m an
appealing character, but he is a type that enforces admiration.
Of such unflinching insistence are martyrs and great leaders
made. There are in every community men who will regard it
as treachery to their highest ideals to compromise at all from
the inviolable principles to which they feel themselves committed.
Such men are difficult to deal with in human situations
involving cooeperation and compromise, and they exhibit
frequently a rigid austerity, bitterness, and hate that do not
readily win sympathy. But it is to such men as these that
many religious and social reforms owe their initiation. Bertrand
Russell, who, whether one agrees with him or not, exhibits
a puritanical devotion to his social beliefs, has finely
described the type:

The impatient idealist--and without some impatience a man will
hardly prove effective--is almost sure to be led into hatred by the
oppositions and disappointments which he encounters in his
endeavors to bring happiness to the world. The more certain he is of
the purity of his motives and the truth of his gospel, the more
indignant will he become when his teaching is rejected.... The intense
faith which enables him to withstand persecution for the sake of his
beliefs makes him consider these beliefs so luminously obvious that
any thinking man who rejects them must be dishonest and must be
actuated by some sinister motive of treachery to the cause.[1]

[Footnote 1: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, pp. xiii-xiv.]

ENTHUSIASM. The enthusiast is another type of self that
plays an important part in social life and makes not the least
attractive of its figures. The exuberant exponent of ideas,
causes, persons, or institutions is an effective preacher,
teacher, or leader of men, and may be, apart from his utility,
intrinsically of the utmost charm. Emotions vividly displayed
are, as already pointed out in connection with sympathy,
readily duplicated in others, and the ardors of the
enthusiast are, when they have the earmarks of sincerity,
contagious. A genuinely enthusiastic personality kindles
his own fire in the hearts of others, and makes them
appreciate as no mere formal analysis could, the vital and moving
aspects of things. Good teaching has been defined as
communication by contagion, and the teachers whom students
usually testify to have influenced them most are not those
who doled out flat prescribed wisdom, but those whose own
informed ardor for their subject-matter co