d it its significance. As time,
space, and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract
and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak
through all things good, strong, significant, and just.

Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all
our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of.
They give its "nature," as we call it, to every special thing.
Everything we know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of
these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are
bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by
their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with
helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental
objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of
classification and conception.

This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the
cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us
as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold
them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete
beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they
inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space.

Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human
feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been
known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for
example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which
the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing
beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the
often quoted passage in his "Banquet," "is to use the beauties of earth
as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other
Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from
fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions,
until from fair notions, he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty,
and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is."[22] In our last
lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like
Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral
structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those
various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the
world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar wor