Human ambitions, widely variant and diverse as they are in kind and degree, are yet easily reduced to common terms. Their least common denominator is clearly to be found in the thought of self-assertion or self-expression. This betrays itself in the constant reaching out on the part of race and individual for more direct and positive mastery of itself and its destiny, seeking in countless directions for but one object, the dominion which men feel to be their right, though it be so far removed from their experience.
Mastery in others, every, man instinctively admires and craves for himself, tempering his admiration to the quality and value of the thing mastered. Above all else, thoughtful men, at least, pay deference to the man who is master of himself. Any lesser dominion is noble in the degree that it approaches this supreme control, which logically is the climax of all ambition. That this climax is so seldom recognized as such is simply because men are so bound up in their fevered striving for the petty objects of immediate and more pressing desire and need. And yet every stage of the unfoldment of human ambition prophesies as its inevitable, though it may be distant, goal, a state in which man is master of himself, possesses dominion over all the earth, and remains "subordinate alone to his Maker" (Science and Health, p. 518).
It is in terms identical with these, that the Christian Scientist describes the somewhat nearer goal of his desire and effort. His initial and very positive advantage rests in his method of more direct attack, and in his understanding that this state of being is actually attainable by the individual, irrespective of the slow ploddings of the race through its roundabout and uncertain ways toward the same goal.
