ly cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as
the sanity of the Old Testament truly said, where there is no vision
the people perisheth. But it is precisely because an ideal is
necessary to man that the man without ideals is in permanent danger of
fanaticism. There is nothing which is so likely to leave a man open to
the sudden and irresistible inroad of an unbalanced vision as the
cultivation of business habits. All of us know angular business men who
think that the earth is flat, or that Mr. Kruger was at the head of a
great military despotism, or that men are graminivorous, or that Bacon
wrote Shakespeare. Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as
dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of
danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against
the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy
and soaked in religion.

Briefly, then, we dismiss the two opposite dangers of bigotry and
fanaticism, bigotry which is a too great vagueness and fanaticism which
is a too great concentration. We say that the cure for the bigot is
belief; we say that the cure for the idealist is ideas. To know the
best theories of existence and to choose the best from them (that is,
to the best of our own strong conviction) appears to us the proper way
to be neither bigot nor fanatic, but something more firm than a bigot
and more terrible than a fanatic, a man with a definite opinion. But
that definite opinion must in this view begin with the basic matters of
human thought, and these must not be dismissed as irrelevant, as
religion, for instance, is too often in our days dismissed as
irrelevant. Even if we think religion insoluble, we cannot think it
irrelevant. Even if we ourselves have no view of the ultimate verities,
we must feel that wherever such a view exists in a man it must be more
important than anything else in him. The instant that the thing ceases
to be the unknowable, it becomes the indispensable. There can be no
doubt, I think, that the idea does exist in our time that there is
something narrow or irrelevant or even mean about attacking a man's
religion, or arguing from it in matters of politics or ethics. There
can be quite as little doubt that such an accusation of narrowness is
itself almost grotesquely narrow. To take an example from comparatively
current events: we all know that it was not uncommon for a man to be
considered a scarecrow of