ely the thought and force of the man who has striven to express
himself completely in a material which, however masterfully used, can
never give its ultimate form to a spiritual conception. It is not an
evidence of failure, but a prophecy of greater achievement. A world in
which the work was as great as the worker, the piece of art as the
artist, would be a finished world in more senses than one; a world in
which all work is inadequate to contain the energy of the worker, all
art insufficient to express the soul of the artist, is necessarily a
prophetic world, bearing witness to the presence of a creative force
in workers and artists immeasurably beyond the capacity of any
perishable material to receive or to preserve.

A rational Idealism is, therefore, not only indestructible in a race
which does not violate the laws of life, but is instilled into the
higher order of minds by the order of life as revealed by science,
history, and the arts. And this idealistic tendency is not only the
poetic temper; it is the hope and safeguard of society. The real
perils of the race are not material; they are always spiritual; and no
peril could be greater than the loss of faith and hope in the
possibility of attaining the best things. If men are ever bereft of
their instinctive or rational conviction that they have the power
ultimately to bring institutions of all kinds into harmony with their
higher conceptions, they will sink into the lethargy of despair or the
slough of sensualism. The belief in the reality of the Ideal in
personal and social life is not only the joy and inspiration of the
poet and thinker; it is also the salvation of the race. It is
imperishable, because it is the product of the play of the imagination
on the realities of life; and until the imagination perishes, the
vision of the ultimate perfection will form and reform in the heart of
every generation. It is the inspiration of every art, the end of every
noble occupation, the secret hope of every fine character.

Idealism in this sense, not as the product of an easy and ignorant
optimism turning away from the facts of life, but as the product of a
large and spiritual dealing with those facts, is the very soul, not
only of noble living, but of those noble expressions of life which the
greater writers have given us. They disclose wide diversity of gifts,
but they have this in common,--that, in discovering to us the
spiritual order of the facts of life, they disc