Excerpt from The Egotist: Essays of Life; Its Work and Its Fortunes, Its Joys and Its Sorrows, Its Success and Its Failure Every man who feels his kinship to all men, to those who are with him, and to those who are to come after him, then comes the longing to do something more than merely to fill a space among them. He would not merely earn his bread, eat it and die. He feels a desire to leave some mark of his presence among men. In the necessity of things, consider ing the myriads of the generations of men, this can be the destiny of but few. The most of men must be content to find their names in the registry of the book of the Most High, for men have made no note of them. While he is contemplating leaving some record, the days steal away. One day the body refuses; the next, he says, what is the use, and then he is old, and nothing done. So the conflict goes on, yet ever hoping, till, suddenly, the end comes. But still the inquiry will come at the close of each day, What have you done? What is its record? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.