LEADERSHIP 

 LEADERSHIP OR PERSONAL ASCENDENCY 1 



CHARLES R. COOLEY 



IT is plain that the theory of ascendency involves the question 

 of the mind's relative valuation of the suggestions coming to it 

 from other minds; leadership depending upon the efficacy of a 

 personal impress on to awaken feeling, thought, action, and so to 

 become a cause of life. While there are some men who seem but 

 to add one to the population, there are others whom we cannot 

 help thinking about; they lend arguments to their neighbors' 

 creeds, so that the life of their contemporaries, and perhaps of 

 following generations, is notably different because they have 

 lived. The immediate reason for this difference is evidently that 

 in the one case there is something seminal or generative in the 

 relation between the personal impression a man makes and the 

 mind that receives it, which is lacking in the other case. 



We are born with what may be roughly described as a vaguely 

 differentiated mass of mental tendency, vast and potent, but un- 

 formed and needing direction. This instinctive material is be- 

 lieved to be the outcome of age-long social development in the 

 race, and hence to be, in a general way, expressive of that devel- 

 opment and functional in its continuance. The process of evolu- 

 tion has established a probability that a man will find himself 

 at home in the world into which he comes, and prepared to share 

 in its activities. 



Obscurely locked within him, inscrutable to himself as to 

 others, is the soul of the whole past, his portion of the energy, the 

 passion, the tendency, of human life. Its existence creates a 

 vague need to live, to feel, to act; but he cannot fulfill this need, 



i Adapted from "Tinman Xature and (he Social Order." Chnp. IX, pp. 

 283-280, 293-294, 2!)7 and 310. Clins Si-rilmer's Sons, X. Y., 1902. 



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