pressions of the ideal--help us to see how deeply rooted
this ideal is in man's mind, and afford us a standard by which to
measure his approaches to the rational perfection of which he dreams.
For the Life of Reason, being the sphere of all human art, is man's
imitation of divinity.

[Sidenote: It has a natural basis which makes it definable.]

To study such an ideal, dimly expressed though it be in human existence,
is no prophetic or visionary undertaking. Every genuine ideal has a
natural basis; anyone may understand and safely interpret it who is
attentive to the life from which it springs. To decipher the Life of
Reason nothing is needed but an analytic spirit and a judicious love of
man, a love quick to distinguish success from failure in his great and
confused experiment of living. The historian of reason should not be a
romantic poet, vibrating impotently to every impulse he finds afoot,
without a criterion of excellence or a vision of perfection. Ideals are
free, but they are neither more numerous nor more variable than the
living natures that generate them. Ideals are legitimate, and each
initially envisages a genuine and innocent good; but they are not
realisable together, nor even singly when they have no deep roots in the
world. Neither is the philosopher compelled by his somewhat judicial
office to be a satirist or censor, without sympathy for those tentative
and ingenuous passions out of which, after all, his own standards must
arise. He is the chronicler of human progress, and to measure that
progress he should be equally attentive to the impulses that give it
direction and to the circumstances amid which it stumbles toward its
natural goal.

[Sidenote: Modern philosophy not helpful.]

There is unfortunately no school of modern philosophy to which a
critique of human progress can well be attached. Almost every school,
indeed, can furnish something useful to the critic, sometimes a physical
theory, sometimes a piece of logical analysis. We shall need to borrow
from current science and speculation the picture they draw of man's
conditions and environment, his history and mental habits. These may
furnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint
of its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the
mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour,
as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of
catastrophes, to be at last sound and