Might and right, then, are stages in the social process, the former having more maturity of organization. They both spring from the general organism of life, and interact upon each other. That which proves hopelessly weak can hardly hold its place as right, but no more can anything remain strong if it is irreconcilably opposed to conscience. A heresy in religion is at first assailed by the powers that be as wrong, but if it proves in the conflict to have an intrinsic might, based on its fitness to meet the mental situation, it comes to be acknowledged as right. On the other hand, a system, like militarism, may seem to be the very incarnation of might, and yet if it is essentially at variance with the trend of human life, it will prove to be weak. Behind both might and right is something greater than either, to which both are responsible, namely, the organic whole of onward life. CHAPTER XI FAME FAME AS SURVIVAL—SYMBOLISM THE ROOT OF FAME—PRESENT SIGNIFICANCE ESSENTIAL—THE ELEMENT OF MYTH—INFLUENCE OF THE LITERARY CLASS—THE GROUP FACTOR—IS FAME JUST?—IS IT DECAYING? Fame, I suppose, is a more extended leadership, the man’s name acting as a symbol through which a personality, or rather the idea we form of it, is kept alive and operative for indefinite time. As ideas about persons are the most active part of our individual thought, so personal fames are the most active part of the social tradition. They float on the current of history not dissolved into impersonality but individual and appealing, and often become more alive the longer the flesh is dead. Biography, real or imaginary, is what we care for most in the past, because it has the fullest message of life. Evidently fame must arise by a process of survival; if one name has it and another does not, it is because the former has in some way appealed more effectively to a state of the human mind, and this not to one person or one time only, but again and again, and to many persons, until it has become a tradition. There must be something about it perennially life-giving, something that has power to awaken latent possibility and enable us to be what we could not be without it. The real fames, then, as distinguished from the transitory reputations of the day, must have a value for human nature itself, for those conditions of the mind that are not created by passing fashions or institutions, but outlive these and give rise to a permanent demand. Or, if the appeal is to an institution, it must be to one of a lasting sort, like a nation or the Christian Church. As Americans we cherish the names of Washington and Lincoln because they symbolize and animate the national history; but even these are felt to belong in the front rank only in so far as they were great men and not merely great Americans.