ersify our opportunities and open chances to us
for new ideals. But, with each new ideal that comes into life, the
chance for a life based on some old ideal will vanish; and he would
needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that
the total sum of significances is positively and absolutely greater at
any one epoch than at any other of the world.

I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain
qualifications in which I myself believe. But one can only make one
point in one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought my
point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. _There are
compensations_: and no outward changes of condition in life can keep the
nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of
different men's hearts. That is the main fact to remember. If we could
not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly believe it, how
our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies and dreads of each
other, would soften down! If the poor and the rich could look at each
other in this way, _sub specie aeternatis_, how gentle would grow their
disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and
let live, would come into the world!

THE END.

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To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals, by William James

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