The case of the man who has an intense conviction that he ought to do a certain kind of work is peculiar, and perhaps not very common; but it is important because it includes some very important individuals.  Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale defied convention in obedience to a feeling of this sort; reformers and agitators in unpopular causes, such as Mazzini, have belonged to this class; so have many men of science.  In cases of this kind the individual conviction deserves the greatest respect, even if there seems no obvious justification for it.  Obedience to the impulse is very unlikely to do much harm, and may well do great good.  The practical difficulty is to distinguish such impulses from desires which produce similar manifestations.  Many young people wish to be authors without having an impulse to write any particular book, or wish to be painters without having an impulse to create any particular picture.  But a little experience will usually show the difference between a genuine and a spurious impulse; and there is less harm in indulging the spurious impulse for a time than in thwarting the impulse which is genuine.  Nevertheless, the plain man almost always has a tendency to thwart the genuine impulse, because it seems anarchic and unreasonable, and is seldom able to give a good account of itself in advance.

What is markedly true of some notable personalities is true, in a lesser degree, of almost every individual who has much vigor or force of life; there is an impulse towards activity of some kind, as a rule not very definite in youth, but growing gradually more sharply outlined under the influence of education and opportunity.  The direct impulse toward a kind of activity for its own sake must be distinguished from the desire for the expected effects of the activity.  A young man may desire the rewards of great achievement without having any spontaneous impulse toward the activities which lead to achievement.  But those who actually achieve much, although they may desire the rewards, have also something in their nature which inclines them to choose a certain kind of work as the road which they must travel if their ambition is to be satisfied.  This artist’s impulse, as it may be called, is a thing of infinite value to the individual, and often to the world; to respect it in oneself and in others makes up nine tenths of the good life.  In most human beings it is rather frail, rather easily destroyed or disturbed; parents and teachers are too often hostile to it, and our economic system crushes out its last remnants in young men and young women.  The result is that human beings cease to be individual, or to retain the native pride that is their birthright; they become machine-made, tame, convenient for the bureaucrat and the drill-sergeant, capable of being tabulated in statistics without anything being omitted.  This is the fundamental evil resulting from lack of liberty; and it is an evil which is being continually intensified as population grows more dense and the machinery of organization grows more efficient.