It is the worst of political blunders to insist on carrying an ideal set of principles into execution, where others have rights of dissent, and those others persons whose assent is as indispensable to success as it is difficult to attain. But to be afraid or ashamed of holding such an ideal set of principles in one's mind in their highest and most abstract expression, does more than any other one cause to stunt or petrify those elements of character to which life should owe most of its savor.[1] [Footnote 1: Morley: _On Compromise_, p. 123.] DOGMATISM AND SELF-ASSERTION. Too often, however, a person of powerful and distinctive opinions is so moved by the momentum of his own strong enthusiasms, so fixed by the habitual definiteness of his own position that he cannot be swayed. In its worst form this is rampant egoism and dogmatism. All of us have met the loud-mouthed exponent of his own opinions, who speaks whatever be the subject, as if _his_ position only were plausible or possible, and as if all who gain-said him were either fools or knaves. If we examine the mental furniture of the average man we shall find it made up of a vast number of judgments of a very precise kind upon subjects of very great variety, complexity, and difficulty. He will have fairly settled views upon the origin and nature of the universe, and upon what he will probably call its meaning; he will have conclusions as to what is to happen to him at death and after, as to what is and what should be the basis of conduct. He will know how the country should be governed, and why it is going to the dogs, why this piece of legislation is good and that bad. He will have strong views upon military and naval strategy, the principles of taxation, the use of alcohol and vaccination, the treatment of influenza, the prevention of hydrophobia, upon municipal trading, the teaching of Greek, upon what is permissible in art, satisfactory in literature, and hopeful in science. The bulk of such opinions must necessarily be without rational basis, since many of them are concerned with problems admitted by the expert to be still unsolved, while as to the rest it is clear that the training and experience of no average man can qualify him to have any opinion on them at all.[1] [Footnote 1: Trotter: _Instincts of the Herd_, p. 36.] In action as well as opinion dogmatism and unbridled self-assertion may be the dominant characteristics of a personality. The man who has a strong will and little social sympathy will be ruthlessly insistent on the attainment of his own ends. This type of self has indeed been set up as an ideal by such philosophers as Nietzsche and Max Stirner, who urged that the really great man should express his own personality irrespective of the weaklings whom he might crush in his comet-like career. Thus writes Nietzsche in one of his characteristic passages: