perception of those standards by which all
actions and institutions must ultimately be weighed and measured. There
are such standards, and the really learned ethnologist will be the last
to deny or overlook them.

The saying of Goethe that "The most unnatural action is yet natural," is
a noble suggestion of tolerance; but human judgment can scarcely go to
the length of Madame de Stael's opinion, when she claims that "To
understand all actions is to pardon all." We must brush away the
sophisms which insist that all standards are merely relative, and that
time and place alone decide on right and wrong. Were that so, not only
all morality, but all science and all knowledge were fluctuating as
sand. But it is not so. The principles of Reason, Truth, Justice and
Love have been, are, and ever will be the same. Time and place, race and
culture, make no difference. Whenever a country is engaged in the
diffusion of these immortal verities, whenever institutions are
calculated to foster and extend them, that country, those institutions,
take noble precedence over all others whose efforts are directed to
lower aims.[15-1]

Something else remains. When the ethnologist has acquired a competent
knowledge of his facts, and deduced from them a clear conception of the
mental states of the peoples he is studying, he has not finished his
labors. Institutions and arts in some degree reflect the mental
conditions of a people, in some degree bring them about; but the
underlying source of both is something still more immaterial and
intangible, yet more potent, to wit, Ideas and Ideals. These are the
primary impulses of conscious human endeavor, and it is vain to attempt
to understand ethnology or to write history without assigning their
consideration the first place in the narration.

I am anxious to avoid here any metaphysical obscurity. My assertion is,
that the chief impulses of nations and peoples are abstract ideas and
ideals, unreal and unrealizable; and that it is in pursuit of these that
the great as well as the small movements on the arena of national life
and on the stage of history have taken place.

You are doubtless aware that this is no new discovery of mine. Early in
this century Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote: "The last and highest duty of
the historian is to portray the effort of the Idea to attain realization
in fact;" and the most recent lecture on the philosophy of history which
I have read, that by Lord Acton, contains t