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 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED
 
 PUBLISHED BV 
 
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 IDEALISM AS 
 A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 BEING THE LECTURES ON 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND MODERN LIEE DELIVERED 
 
 BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY JONES 
 
 LL.D., D.Litt. 
 
 FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW 
 
 GLASGOW 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS 
 
 PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 1909
 
 / 7u 9 
 
 GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITV PRESS 
 BV ROBKRT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
 
 TO 
 MY FRIEND 
 
 MUNGO W. MACGALLUM 
 
 AND 
 
 TO THE MEMORY 
 OF OUR BELOVED MASTER 
 
 EDWARD CAIRD
 
 •^uipeTe S' v/meh Truvre^' ejueiu 6e kui jueTUTTia-Oe 
 
 /uiP)](Ta(r6e. 
 
 Home)' Hyirvn. ApolL Del. 166
 
 PREFACE 
 
 AVere it not to take too great a liberty, I 
 should dedicate this book to the Australian 
 people ; for my memory of their kindness will 
 not fade, and I would fain let them know that 
 I am grateful. I have dedicated it to one who 
 labours continually for their welfare, and to 
 the memory of a great Idealist — his Teacher 
 and my own. 
 
 The book consists of lectures delivered be- 
 fore the University of Sydney. But the written 
 must differ from the spoken word, and I have 
 recast the lectures and added to them. 
 
 The University, 
 Glasgow, May, 1909.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 L The Tools and the Task .... 1 
 
 11. Freedom: First the Blade . . . .31 
 
 III. Freedom : Then the Ear . . . .67 
 
 IV. Freedom : After that the full Corn . 103 
 Y. Wordsworth and Browning . . .139 
 
 VI. The Call of the Age 193 
 
 VII. The Answer of Idealism .... 231
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK. 
 
 Hegel's Inaugural Address at Heidelberg : An invita- 
 tion to the reflective life : Philosophy not always in 
 official garb ; its relation to poetry ; why taken in these 
 lectures as meaning Idealism, 
 
 Man's Life complex because it comprises his World : 
 Connexion of Philosophy and Life illustrated : Hegel and 
 Napoleon the First — which of them means most now : 
 Great men and their times. 
 
 Ideas the only agents in man's life : Human history 
 a succession of ruling Ideas : The Idea of Evolution 
 now in power ; at work, before Darwin, in poetry and 
 philosophy, and in the world ; an exponent of self- 
 expanding life ; which is life attaining Freedom.

 
 I. 
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK. 
 
 In taking up the task with which you have 
 entrusted and honoured me, and inviting you to 
 consider the bearing of philosophy upon modern 
 life, I am reminded of the first words addressed 
 by Hegel to his students in Heidelberg. It was 
 in October of 1816. The Napoleonic wars had 
 just closed with the battle of Waterloo. Ger- 
 many had risen triumphant from those ' fatal 
 fields, on which her sons were taught a base 
 submission.' She had ' saved her Nationality,' 
 as Hegel said, ' the basis and essence of the 
 best life ' ; and she could now turn her mind to 
 the arts of peace, and labour to fulfil the higher 
 laws. Philosophy might once more engage 
 the attention and the good-will of men. She 
 might again lift up her voice grown so silent, and
 
 4 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 a world which had become well-nigh deaf to her 
 might again be willing to listen. The spirit of 
 the time immersed in matters temporal, its whole 
 powers engaged in a fearful strife for the out- 
 ward means of life, might now turn its thoughts 
 inwards upon itself and take possession of the 
 riches of its own content. The Church might now 
 raise its head side by side with the secular State, 
 which hitherto had swallowed up all interests. 
 Side by side with the Kingdom of the World, 
 towards which had streamed the thoughts and 
 strivings of men, the Kingdom of God might 
 become once more an object of contemplation ; 
 and along with the political and other interests 
 of the outer life, science, the free rational life of 
 Spirit, might again break out into blossom. 
 
 Speaking for those whose lives had matured 
 amidst the storms, Hegel congratulated the 
 students that their youth had fallen at a time 
 when they could devote it to Truth, and the 
 undisturbed pursuit of knowledge. ' I hope,' 
 he said, ' that I may deserve and win your 
 confidence. But I make no claim upon you, 
 save that, before all else, you put your trust
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 5 
 
 in knowledge, and in yourselves. The first con- 
 dition of philosophy is courage towards the 
 truth, faith in the might of mind. Man, because 
 he is mind, may dare, nay, must dare to think 
 himself worthy of what is highest. The greatness 
 and the power of mind he cannot esteem 
 enough. But if he be armed with this faith 
 nothing will prove so hard or stubborn as not 
 to yield itself up to him. The inner being and 
 essence of the Universe, at first hidden and 
 shut up within itself, has no force with which 
 to withstand the courage that will know. It 
 must evolve itself before our eyes, and lay out 
 for our use its treasures and its depths.' 
 
 It is not for little men to take upon their lips 
 the language of heroes ; yet we can profit by 
 their example and believe in their cause. And 
 it has seemed to me that there is an analogy, 
 not too remote, between your present circum- 
 stances as a people, and those of the Prussia 
 of Hegel's day. You, too, have been long 
 engaged in an absorbing struggle with outward 
 and secular things. You have been striving, 
 not without some measure of success, to tame
 
 6 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 a vast continent to your use, and to establish 
 therein an independent and self- sufficient State 
 worthy of that from which you have sprung, 
 gathering yourselves together in these years, 
 amidst many troubles, into a single people, con- 
 scious of one political life. If the task has taxed 
 all your strength and claimed all your powers, 
 and if the spirit of your people has been so 
 immersed in it as to leave little of the leisure 
 or the mood for aught else, who can marvel or 
 blame? To live well, man must first live. Never- 
 theless the order of time is not in all respects 
 the order of causes ; and there is a most true 
 sense in which the great things of life must be 
 sought first, and all other things only as 
 addenda and secondary consequences. And I 
 may, perhaps, be permitted to echo the philo- 
 sopher's hope, that for you, too, the time has 
 come when you can with a more serious intent 
 and a more deliberate purpose devote yourselves 
 to the contemplation of the world within your- 
 selves, the world in which ideals are the only 
 powers. Then you will strive to comprehend 
 and employ more fully, and less wastefully.
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 7 
 
 the greatest of all the energies of the world, 
 namely, those which reside within a people's 
 character. 
 
 It is to this contemplation that I venture to 
 invite you in these lectures on Philosophy and 
 Modern Life ; and it is in this broad sense that 
 I understand philosophy. I do not conceive it 
 as a technical discipline of the schools, nor as a 
 succession of systems of abstract thought, each 
 in turn professing a rounded comj)leteness and 
 refuted and overturned by the one which follows. 
 Philosophy is an attitude of mind, rather than 
 a doctrine. It is the experience of the world 
 becoming reflective, and endeavouring to com- 
 prehend itself. Hence a final philosophic theory 
 is not to be attained, and a fixed system is not to 
 be sought. Experience changes and grows, for it 
 is a process ; and a completed doctrine of an 
 evolving process, a static theory of a dynamic 
 reality, must prove false. We can at best but 
 catch its trend and try to discern its greater 
 laws. 
 
 This task of self- contemplation and self-com- 
 prehension is not one which man can take
 
 8 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 up or let alone as it best pleases himself. 
 It is a necessity which chooses, and is not 
 chosen. At a certain stage of the evolution 
 of man's rational nature, reflexion arises inevi- 
 tably. It becomes the urgent condition of 
 further development. The future can be faced 
 only in the light of the past which only reflexion 
 recovers ; and the individual, or a nation, can 
 achieve a new triumph only if it has learnt 
 the lessons of its own deeds. Reflexion must 
 succeed action and set free its meaning, if better 
 action is to follow. 
 
 We can not be deterred from this reflexion 
 by the fact that our experience is ever wider 
 than our thoughts concerning it ; and that, in 
 the end, many of our deeper motives lie hidden 
 and our purposes remain blind. Man is destined 
 by his very greatness to pursue ends he cannot 
 adequately achieve and to ask questions he 
 cannot fully answer. But a little light is better 
 than total darkness. And philosophy, even 
 although she seems, as Kant said, to have failed 
 to strike a sure path, as the natural sciences 
 have done, but ' has kept groping about, and
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 9 
 
 groping too, amongst mere ideas,' remains an 
 enterprise which man cannot set aside. If 
 he cannot answer her problems because they 
 exceed his powers, neither can he forego the 
 attempt, for these problems spring from the very 
 nature of his reason. 
 
 The despair of philosophy has sprung in 
 part from its own pretensions. It has isolated 
 itself too much : it has distinguished itself too 
 proudly from the ordinary reflexion of thought- 
 ful men. Like Elijah, it has 'been very jealous 
 for the Lord God of hosts,' and borne unheeded 
 testimony in times hard of hearing for the 
 unseen world of mind. But it has exaggerated 
 its loneliness and cried out, ' I, even I only, 
 am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.' 
 It has forgotten the companionship of reflective 
 men who have never worn its garb, and yet 
 have not bowed their knees unto Baal, nor 
 kissed him. Yet these are many. Even in a 
 people like yours to whom the secular interests 
 of the passing day are engrossing, and in whom 
 the pulse of action beats high, as it needs must 
 in a young nation, there are not a few whom
 
 10 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 these interests do not satisfy. They turn their 
 minds inwards and seek to know something of 
 the world of things that are spiritual, in which, 
 after all, is the true dwelling-place of man. 
 ' They are men who convince themselves of 
 the existence of the eternal, of the neces- 
 sary, of the universal, and who seek to form 
 conceptions which cannot fail them, yea, which 
 are not disturbed, but rather confirmed, by the 
 contemplation of that which passes away.' 
 
 Pre-eminent amongst such men — philosophers 
 disturbed and often even repelled by ' philo- 
 sophy ' — are the poets. I admit the diflference 
 between philosophy and poetry, and acknow- 
 ledge that the quarrel of art with the spirit 
 which must dissect before it reconstructs is 
 undying. Yet in the end philosophy is at one 
 with poetry. It sets the apparent in sharper 
 contrast with the real. It wars with the par- 
 ticular, dwells amongst contradictions, it refutes, 
 argues, confutes and demonstrates, as poetry 
 never does, except when it forgets its mission, as 
 sometimes it may.^ But their goal is the same, 
 
 ^ For instance in the later poems of Browning.
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 11 
 
 even though the one reaches it by an inspired 
 flight, while the other must hew its way, and 
 drag its steps. They are one in their deeper 
 purpose, and both are alien, down to the marrow 
 of their being, to the spirit which reduces life 
 into a platitude by emptying it of its ideal 
 meaning. When the man of the world puts 
 ' one passion in the place of another — business, 
 inclinations, amusements, hobbies, and proves 
 them all one after another only to cry out that 
 " all is vanity," ' both poetry and philosophy find 
 his speech 'blasphemous.' The world has for 
 both of them ' a magic value,' for it has been 
 steeped in thought, and they have felt the har- 
 mony of its spiritual music. In speaking of 
 philosophy, therefore, I would have you renounce 
 the shibboleths of the schools ; and, in order to 
 understand its significance for modern life, learn 
 of everyone who has sought ' the higher nature 
 in nature itself,' or have vindicated the living 
 against the dead and mechanical. 
 
 To extend the meaning of our subject in this 
 manner is evidently to despair of treating more 
 than its rim. I shall, therefore, try to limit
 
 12 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 it on another side, and I shall do so in a more 
 arbitrary way. In these lectures I shall dwell, 
 almost exclusively, with that particular form 
 of philosophy which is most in touch with our 
 modern life and most akin to the poetry in 
 which that life has found its best expression. 
 This form goes by the name of Idealism, and, 
 more technically, of 'Objective,' or 'Absolute' 
 Idealism. It is usually identified — in one sense 
 too much and in another too little — with the 
 theory of Hegel : too much, in that this way 
 of looking at life belongs not more to Hegel 
 than it does to Plato or Aristotle, or even to 
 Spinoza ; too little, in that our debt to Hegel, 
 the debt of the general mind of our times, is 
 most inadequately recognized. 
 
 But, although this limitation of the meaning 
 of ' philosophy ' is arbitrary, it is less arbitrary 
 than it seems, and there are better reasons 
 than at first appear for hard dealing with rival 
 theories. In the first place, it is not clear 
 that they exist as living doctrines. Idealism 
 has for a considerable time engaged the re- 
 flective thought of Europe, and especially of
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 13 
 
 Germany and Great Britain, as no other doc- 
 trine has done. The proof is two-fold. On 
 the one hand, those thinkers who reject it are 
 not able to get away from it. They propound 
 no rival theory of their own, but maintain a 
 precarious existence by living on the defects of 
 Idealism, and by indicating — which is not difficult 
 — the problems which it has left unsolved. On 
 the other hand, the principles of this philosophy 
 have entered deeply into the theoretical and 
 practical life of our times. Its main hypotheses 
 are being illustrated and made good in the 
 sciences, especially in those which are biological 
 and human ; they are illumined in the greatest 
 modern poetry, from Lessing and Goethe to 
 Wordsworth and Browning ; and they circulate 
 in the arteries of our social and political life. 
 There is a certain unanimity of endeavour and 
 community of aspiration amongst the poets, 
 philosophers and reforming spirits of our times : 
 they all make for Idealism. And there is far 
 less discrepancy amongst the conclusions of the 
 philosophers themselves than at first appears ; 
 for it is the way of philosophers, as it is of
 
 -J\v^\> 14 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 .T' 
 
 theologians and politicians, to make much of 
 their differences. 
 
 If, however, I can do little justice to one 
 side of our subject and must narrow down the 
 meaning of ' Philosophy ' in this way, I can do still 
 less justice to the ' Modern Life ' upon which 
 it bears. Man's life, even when most simple and 
 rudimentary, is the most complex thing in the 
 world. In him the scattered rays of natural 
 existence are gathered together : even as a 
 physical being and mere organism ' he is the 
 consummation of the scheme of things.' And 
 when we turn to his mind, the mind which he 
 is, we find that it is always the counterpart 
 of his whole world. No element or item of the 
 power or the beauty of the world comes to have 
 existence for him at all, except it enter through 
 the portals of his spirit. The scheme of things, 
 the whole furniture of his heaven and earth, 
 the multitudinous objects of his thoughts and 
 purposes, are facts of his experience, the content, 
 nay, the substance of his soul. His world, be 
 it narrow or wide, rich or poor, is focussed in 
 his spirit, and the one measures the other. Its
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 15 
 
 reality passes Id to him as meaning ; it is trans- 
 muted by his rational nature into sensibility, 
 feeling, thought, volition : and if he thus com- 
 prises his world what more need be said to 
 mark his intrinsic complexity ? I need not 
 attempt to show how that complexity is further 
 complicated by the reflexion of one man's life 
 into another's, so as to form that most wondrous 
 of all manifestations of the power of man's 
 nature, namely, human society. 
 
 These, then, are the two facts whose inter- 
 action we have to consider in these lectures. 
 
 I may illustrate the connexion of Philosophy 
 with Modern Life by an incident in the history 
 of both. There is a tradition, which is sub- 
 stantially true, that while the guns of Napoleon 
 the First were roaring around Jena, Hegel, the 
 founder of the modern form of Idealism, was 
 seen sitting at the window of his lodgings in 
 that city, writing his Phaenomenology of Spirit 
 — a work which, with Aristotle's Metaphysics, 
 ranks as one of the most adventurous voyages 
 ever made in the world of mind. At that time 
 no less significant business could well be con-
 
 16 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 ceived than that on which this solitary man was 
 silently engaged, amidst the dreadful pudder of 
 the disastrous battle. But it is not easy to 
 decide what is great and what is small in human 
 affairs. If we look back now, from the vantage 
 ground of a new century, we shall justly 
 hesitate before resolving which has meant most 
 for mankind, whether it was the thought of 
 the philosopher or the armed hosts of the 
 devastating conqueror. ' Beware,' says Emer- 
 son, ' when the great God lets loose a thinker 
 on this planet. Then all things are at risk. 
 It is as when a conflagration has broken out 
 in a great city, and no man knows what is 
 safe, or where it will end.'^ 
 
 I do not mean to suggest that the history 
 of the world has been made either by battles 
 or by books : though there are some books which 
 mean more than most battles. The writing of 
 the Phaenomenology, like the battle of Jena, 
 was only a picturesque moment in a vast 
 movement which had long been preparing. 
 Significajice belongs t o that w^h ich is in the ^ 
 
 ^ Crisis.
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 17 
 
 context of the world, not to that which stands 
 isolate and singular. No thinker is great and 
 no man is potent in action save by virtue of 
 the might of his times : as no word has meaning, 
 and no musical note or architectural curve has 
 beauty, except in its place. Great men appear 
 in great ages, and they are creatures of what they 
 create. They come in ' the fulness of time,' their 
 messengers sent before their face, into a world 
 which is waiting for them. They are the con- 
 sequences of vast upheavals, products of the 
 world's stress and strain, pushed upwards from 
 beneath by the pressure of mute social forces 
 which have been long mustering. For this 
 reason great men come, not singly as a rule, 
 but in groups, like highest peaks in a moun- 
 tainous region. The greatest of them does not 
 stand alone, nor does he rise abruptly from the 
 level plain. His base is on the table-land of 
 some vast public emotion, and around him are 
 
 companions less in magnitude only than himself. 
 At such a time we behold a whole people 
 
 'from the depth 
 
 Of shameful imbecility uprisen, 
 
 Fresh as the morning star ' ;
 
 18 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 and find 
 
 ' in rudest men 
 Self-sacrifice the firmest; generous love 
 And continence of mind, and sense of right, 
 Uppermost in the midst of fiercest strife.' 
 
 Prelude, ix. 
 
 All alike, men of thought and men of action, 
 the mighty and the lowly, are at such periods 
 quickened as by some new spiritual force. The 
 earth has circled round as if in its sleep, and 
 a new spring has broken upon mankind. Some 
 new conception shoots forth its rays and en- 
 lightens men to larger issues. 
 
 This matter is worth looking at for a moment 
 longer ; for, unless I err, we are in the afternoon 
 of sucli a day, in the ppw^p-of^a conception of 
 -;io*'- -^ which both Hegel and Napoleon, each in his 
 own fashion, were prime exponents. It will 
 .^;^-^ ^ help us to understand ourselves, and to realize 
 the magic power of great thoughts. For they 
 have great consequences ; nay, they rule the 
 world. Its actions are their offspring. 
 
 It is the unique quality of rational beings 
 that, in great things as in small, they act from 
 ideas. Man's impulses are never blind, nor are
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 19 
 
 even those desires animal which are most akin to 
 the beast's. Rays of light from the intelligence 
 strike upon them and pierce their texture, and, 
 like clouds, they catch new hues of meaning and 
 of beauty. Through their relation to mind the 
 passions become capable of an excess of evil, as 
 they never are in the brute ; and, for the same„--^vvA^<i\AaUe^ 
 reason, they are capable of being ^^jietrfied to 
 the service of holy causes. Man is always pur- 
 suing ends, great or small. It is the idea of 
 that which seems to him desirable, not his mere 
 muscles, or nerves, or bare sense and impulse, 
 which carries him to his every act. Only on 
 that account is he free and responsible ; only 
 because the deed was first in his intelligence does 
 he appropriate it to himself and say ' I did it. ' 
 
 That the root of the idea which brings the 
 act lay in his blind passions, or the dark move- 
 ments of his impulses, and secret needs of his 
 uncomprehended disposition and organic frame, 
 need not and can not be denied. There is 
 moral as well as merely psychological truth in 
 the saying, that there is nothing in the intellect 
 which was not already in the senses.
 
 20 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 But there is truth also in its converse — that 
 there is nothing in the senses which was not 
 already in the intelligence. The wliole truth 
 lies in neither of these sayings ; for there is no 
 ' before ' and ' after ' in the case. No sense or 
 impulse exists in man, bare of all intelligence ; 
 and no intelligence which is not suffused with 
 sense. 'Even for the basest sensualist what 
 is sense but the implement of phantasy ; the 
 vessel it drinks out of ? ' Man is not a machine, 
 nor machine-made, of parts outside of parts. The 
 conflict within him, so-called, of passion with 
 reason, has both passion and reason on both 
 sides. Ends of action, base or high, alternate 
 before his mind, attracting and repelling ; and 
 all the ends alike are ideas weighted with 
 impulse and so carry to their mark. And it is 
 this, the presence of the ideal element in every 
 act of man, his pursuit of purposes, mean or 
 noble, which he has set before himself, that dis- 
 tinguishes him abruptly from the brute, and 
 leaves him the promise of being free. If at any 
 time a man urges ' It was my passion, and not I, 
 which did the act,' he has deprived himself of
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 21 
 
 the privilege of being human. His excuse is 
 hardly ever true : when it is, his fellows do not 
 hold him to his deeds. 
 
 Man picks his way in life. He selects the 
 strands of his purposes from the multitudinous 
 elements of a close-woven world of social and 
 physical environment. He is free only to the 
 extent of his purposes. Where they are narrow 
 and near, his liberty is limited. But it expands 
 with his comprehension of his world, and is 
 fullest when the better trend and tendencies 
 of his time have passed into his life and be- 
 come his intelligent will. 
 
 These considerations, however, only bring 
 forth anew the power of ideas ; for they imply 
 that the master of his time is the man who has 
 understood it ; even as it is the man who com- 
 prehends the energies of nature who can link 
 them to his purposes. Its powers become his 
 conceptions. There is no break or division 
 whatsoever between the stuff of thought and 
 thought itself, between fact and its meaning. 
 
 'Nature is made better by no mean, 
 But nature makes that mean : so, o'er the art 
 Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
 That nature makes.'
 
 22 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 Man Jiiids his true ideas : his makiug of them 
 is the finding. Every valid invention is also 
 a discovery. The ideas which have power over 
 the world, are the powers of the world ; and 
 the poet, philosopher or statesman only sets 
 them free. Hence, when man's history is truly 
 written, written from within, what we shall 
 read is not of the succession of one Royal House 
 to another — of the House of Hanover to the 
 House of Stuart, or of the House of Stuart to 
 the Tudors and Plantagenets : we shall witness, 
 rather, the succession of dynasties of ideas, 
 liberated, set on the throne of the age of which 
 they are the natural rulers, by the great minds 
 which have caught the first glimpse of them. 
 For generations, and sometimes for centuries to- 
 gether, such conceptions direct the thoughts and 
 purposes of the general mind ; and they do so 
 with a power so absolute that their presence is 
 often not suspected, for they have insinuated 
 themselves into the very disposition of the 
 men whom they control. 
 
 Such absolute, such subtle dominion is exer- 
 cised by the idea of Evolution in our own
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 23 
 
 day. There is no science, from Geology to 
 Theology, which does not contemplate the object 
 of its enquiry in its light. The old static, 
 rigid, cataclysmic way of regarding objects is 
 well-nigh obsolete. We do not consider that 
 we understand anything rightly — nor plant, nor 
 animal, nor man, nor even the fixed strata of 
 the earth's crust, or the planet itself — till we 
 can indicate its place in a process. The whole 
 order of Nature is in movement for modern 
 science. On the level of biology, and thence 
 upwards, it is a grand march, the process 
 onwards of one inexhaustible life, multitudinous 
 in its energy, within which every individual 
 form has its own particular place. Poetry and 
 philosophy, and even theology when it has the 
 courage of its cause, take up the tale of natural 
 science and continue it. They proclaim that 
 the whole scheme of Spirit is also in movement : 
 the psychologist, moralist and sociologist but 
 mark its steps, explaining, or striving to explain, 
 all things by what they were and are about to 
 be. Thus the history of mankind presents itself, 
 through the medium of this conception of
 
 24 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 development, which finds the past in the present 
 and first of all the future, as the gradual unveil- 
 ing of a purpose which is universal and therefore 
 omnipresent, — a purpose which overcomes the 
 discrete distinctions of time even while main- 
 taining them, and, like the Snake of the 
 Ancients, is coiled around the changing order 
 of the world of reality, and has neither beginning 
 nor end. 
 
 Li a word, the Idea of Evolution is the lord 
 of all our present thinking — the subtle presuppo- 
 sition which suffuses all our endeavour, whether 
 in the sphere of knowledge or in that of social 
 and moral practice. It is the author of our 
 very temperament, and determines the mental 
 disposition of our times. It has given to the 
 modern age its characteristic ways of action, 
 and unique features, making our era distinct 
 and distinguishable amongst the ages of the 
 world in all its thinking and striving, whether 
 in science or in philosophy, in morals or in 
 politics, in poetry or in religion. 
 
 Now, it is customary to attribute the first use 
 of this Idea of Evolution to Charles Darwin.
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 25 
 
 In a narrow sense this is just. Darwin was 
 the first to apply it in a great way in one 
 particular field. He did so with such master- 
 ing power of observation and scientific imagina- 
 tion as to arrest the attention and compel the 
 belief of the general mind. His success, in his 
 own relatively confined department, facilitated 
 the application of this idea to others, and gave 
 to it concrete form and convincing force. 
 
 But the idea was working powerfully in the 
 world before the days of Darwin. To trace it 
 no further — to ignore its use by Aristotle, who 
 is the source of so many of the ideas of modern 
 science — the conception was not only familiar 
 to the poet-philosophers of Germany, to Lessing 
 and Goethe, to Kant and Hegel, to Fichte and 
 Schelling and Schiller, it constituted, one may 
 almost say, the medium through which they 
 observed the world and by which they sought 
 to arrange its phenomena in a rational order. 
 In it, and in the Idealism which it implied for 
 them, in one form or another, was their sole hope 
 of overcoming the dualisms into which the 
 world had fallen, and of breaking down the
 
 26 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 hard contradictions which harassed modern 
 civilization. 
 
 But it is vain to seek the first beginnings 
 of a great conception, not less vain than to 
 seek to mark the first beginnings of the blossom 
 of a tree, which is as old as the life that it 
 expresses and adorns. There are no absolute 
 origins in a continuous world. These poets and 
 philosophers themselves found the conception of 
 Evolution to their hand ; they only liberated 
 it from the mass of modern history within 
 which it was operative. When they arrived 
 the world was already endeavouring to escape 
 from the harsh contrasts and to break down 
 the intolerable antagonisms of the Middle Age, 
 which had set the next world against this, spirit 
 against nature, the sacred against the secular. 
 Men were already in revolt against a theology 
 which mortified reason, a religion which sought 
 to root out nature, and ' a social state in 
 which men were held down and held asunder 
 by fixed class divisions.' They were seeking 
 enlargement : they would stretch their limbs 
 and breathe freely in a world not all alien and
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 27 
 
 unfriendly. Luther had spoken and Cromwell 
 had fought. The banner of liberty had been un- 
 furled, and it had become the symbol of many 
 different rights yet to be made good for the 
 lay and the common man. Instead of the 
 plaintive ' feminine voice of mediaeval piety/ 
 the voice as of a weary pilgrim and sojourner, 
 longing in a vain and unsubstantial world for 
 ' the native land, the patria of the soul/ a 
 manlier cry is heard : ' Here, too, is our Home, 
 for God is here ; and the true Shekina is in 
 the soul of man.' 'Nature is not godless, nor 
 is God unnatural.' The natural world is the 
 symbol and vesture of a divine power ; and 
 the natural relations of man to man are not 
 vile and bestial, but capable of being smitten 
 through and through with holiness, as a cloud 
 is pierced with light. 
 
 Before this period, irreverence had crept 
 into man's worship and blasphemy into his 
 adorations. ' Nature in late centuries,' said 
 Carlyle, ' was irreverently supposed to be dead, 
 an old eight-day clock made many thousand 
 years ago, and still ticking on, but as dead as
 
 28 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 brass, which the Maker at most sat looking at, 
 in a distant, singuLar, and now plainly indeed, 
 incredible manner. But now, I am happy to 
 observe, she is everywhere asserting herself not 
 to be dead brass at all, but alive and miracu- 
 lous, celestial-infernal, with an emphasis that 
 will again penetrate the thickest head in the 
 planet by-and-by.' But Idealism cures irrever- 
 ence, especially the Idealism of Love, which 
 Christianity is. It lifts the lowly, it asserts 
 the rights of the weak, and breaks the power 
 of the strong. From of old the prophets of 
 this creed were revolutionaries. ' Those who 
 have turned the world upside down are come 
 hither also.' And their successors in the modern 
 world are engaged in the same task of levelling 
 upwards, ' putting down the mighty from their 
 seats, and exalting them of low degree ' ; de- 
 throning the tyrannic state and the dogmatic 
 church, and setting in their place a Sovereignty 
 whose seat is in the heart of man, a Democracy 
 which v/ould be just, and a Religion which would 
 be free — free to find God everywhere. 
 
 In this enterprise the speculations of the
 
 THE TOOLS AND THE TASK 29 
 
 philosopher, the imaginations of the poet and 
 the tumultuous strivings of the man of action 
 blend together. Hegel, Goethe and Napoleon 
 were all alike, though each in his own degree and 
 manner, products and exponents of that Spirit of 
 Freedom which has been brooding over the 
 chaotic history of the modern world. The idea 
 of Evolution is itself the hypothesis, the metho- 
 dizing conception which we employ to render 
 intelligible to ourselves the process which Spirit 
 follows in becoming free. It suggests that ex- 
 pansion, that victory of the living thing over 
 its own limits, that conversion of things external 
 which bound and restrain, into elements within 
 its own life, that determination not from without 
 but from within, which Freedom is. 
 
 It is our task to explain this movement of 
 the Spirit of Freedom, for this is Modern life ; 
 and especially to show how it has been influ- 
 enced by the Idealism which is itself the 
 effluence and manifestation of that life.
 
 II. 
 
 FREEDOM : FIRST THE BLADE. 
 
 The Idea of Freedom not simple, except as the seed is 
 simple : The civilization of mankind is the process of 
 evolving its meaning, and the process of life is life 
 itself. 
 
 Spii'it is free by nature, but things which grow must 
 acquire their nature : The freedom of the individual 
 and of society is at first a blind movement towards an 
 unknown good : Mr. Balfour magnifies " unconscious 
 reason " ; why his contrast of tradition and reason is 
 false : Man's life at first assimilative, and the social 
 traditions are the substance of his soul. 
 
 Man ceases to be docile and becomes a critic of his 
 social world : The social world loses and the individual 
 conscience gains authority : Man versus the State ; why 
 his negative attitude is false : The true Reformer a 
 lover of the ancient ways, and takes their part against 
 themselves ; But the world as it is takes the side of its 
 errors and he is forced into opposition ; Yet the web 
 of history is not rent, although its tissue is strained : 
 The spread of the controversy between the authority 
 within and the authority without.
 
 II. 
 
 FEEEDOM: FIEST THE BLADE. 
 
 The idea of Freedom, like the idea of Mind 
 or Keason or Will, seems so simple as to need 
 no explication. But this simplicity is all false 
 appearance. These ideas are simple only in 
 the sense in which the seed of a plant is 
 simple : its complexities are hidden, and its 
 powers are asleep ; it requires the whole 
 scheme of nature, earth and sea and sky and 
 the revolving seasons, all in one conspiracy, 
 to bring them forth. So it is with Mind, 
 with Will, with the Spirit of Man and its 
 Freedom. What Mind, Will, Spirit are is 
 revealed only by what they can do, and what 
 they can do is made plain only by the ex- 
 panding movement of human civilization, as it 
 expresses itself in the sciences and arts, the
 
 34 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 commerce and industries, the moral habits, the 
 social usages and the political institutions of 
 man's advancing career. As the chemist brings 
 out the qualities of a gas or liquid, by 
 observing ' its give and take ' with other sub- 
 stances, or as the physicist, by his experiments, 
 puts the fact he would understand in new 
 contexts, in order that its latent forces may be 
 set free, so are man's powers made evident — and, 
 indeed, made real also — through his interaction 
 with the world and with his fellows. To 
 change the circumstances of a man is not only 
 to try him, but often enough to exhibit, even 
 to himself, a weakness he did not fear or a 
 capacity whose existence he did not suspect. 
 
 Civilization is nothing but the process of 
 revealing and realizing the Nature of Man, 
 and the revelation is still going on, mysteriously 
 and tortuously enough. The intrinsic might of 
 man's will and reason, the slumbering splen- 
 dours of his spirit are still in process of being 
 liberated. Human nature is capable of a greater 
 variety of kinds than any other ' nature,' and 
 is ever breaking out into new forms ; for every
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 35 
 
 individual is in his degree unique. No indi- 
 vidual, however great, embodies all its possi- 
 bilities, nor is he at his best when he is 
 singular in his greatness, and his 
 
 'towering mind 
 O'erlooks its prostrate fellows.' 
 
 For only as a member of a society which is 
 worthy of him, ' as' the citizen of a good state,' 
 and in interaction with his peers in virtue can 
 man's powers shine forth fully. And a State 
 which is strong in all its fibres, all of whose 
 elements are in harmony, in which no one is 
 ignorant of the best or heedless of the highest 
 — such a State as Hegel called ' The Kingdom 
 of Heaven on Earth' — is, verily, not 'at hand.' 
 Thoughtful men wdio are lovers of their kind 
 and know something of the toilsome road which 
 civilization has had to travel in order to reach 
 the meagre results they see in the social and 
 political life around them, are appalled by the 
 contrast of what we are and what we might 
 be : so much is yet to learn till our swords 
 are beaten into ploughshares, and man is
 
 36 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 adequate to himself and to the framework in 
 which his life is set. 
 
 It is this process of realizing the intrinsic 
 powers of Mind, the process by which Spirit 
 comes into possession of itself and the world, 
 that is, becomes ' Free,' which, in its most 
 prominent features, we have now to con- 
 template. 
 
 There is a sense in which Spirit is always 
 free.^ To be free is its essential nature. It 
 is unique in virtue of that fact. But the 
 nature of a thing which grows is the last of 
 all its achievements. It is not the seed but 
 the full grown plant, or, rather, it is the 
 w^iole process from the lowest stage to the 
 hio;hest which reveals the nature of the life 
 within. It is not the crude savage or the 
 barbarous society, but the wisest men and the 
 countless achievements and varied energies of a 
 civilized nation, or, rather, it is the process 
 from savagery to civilization which reveals the 
 
 ^ ' Spirit ' is the best word I know for thought and feeling 
 and will and all the powers of man in interpenetration and 
 indivisible unity.
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 87 
 
 nature of * Spirit.' ^ Much vain controversy 
 
 arises from neglecting the fact that it is the 
 
 process which reveals ; and many questions which 
 
 will remain unanswerable to the end of time 
 
 are asked : for instance, the question whether 
 
 the Will of Man is, or is not, free. This 
 
 question does not admit of a definitive ' Yes ' 
 
 or ' No. ' Static categories are all out of place 
 
 when applied to things in process, which all 
 
 growing things are. They distort the facts. 
 
 To do such things justice we require both ' Yes' 
 
 and ' No.' It is true, in a sense, that the child 
 
 is the man; but it is also true that he is .^--/oi^-'^''^^! 
 
 not the man, and that his sole Jbusine'ss, his 
 
 life through, is to becjim^'the man. A de- -A^tUt-U^^ 
 
 veloping being is what it can become "T'and yet 
 
 it must become what it is. We speak of 'ttvtcc<.n:tie:: 
 
 'unrealized possibilities, ',--hardly realizing what 
 
 contradictions we are dealing in, or knowing 
 
 what we mean : for we cannot treat possibilities 
 
 ^ When a particulai^ly mean or selfish act is done by any one, 
 soiae men have a way of exclaiming, ' That is human nature.' 
 I should like to protest. Such actions are not typical of 
 human nature. They are distortions and arrestments of human 
 natui'e. To call them typical is blasphemy against the noblest 
 thing we know.
 
 38 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 either as real, or as unreal, either as actual or 
 as ideal : not as real, because they are only- 
 possibilities ; not as unreal, because they are 
 possibilities. 
 
 Life is placed at the point of intersection 
 of what is and what is not, where actual and 
 ideal meet and mingle, and human life most 
 conspicuously of all ; for it is capable of more 
 divergent extremes, and can depart further 
 from itself, than aught else. Man most of all 
 compels us, as we strive to take in the fulness 
 of his meaning, to regard his actual being as 
 potential ; for his ideals of a knowledge which 
 is adequate, and of conduct which fulfils his 
 aims and satisfies his spirit, transcend his 
 achievements and are beyond his reach. And 
 yet, these ideals, things that ought to be and 
 are not, are the very deepest realities within 
 him. For are they not the source of all his 
 striving, and the very energy of his enterprise ? 
 Man's life is the working of his ideals. His 
 nature ^'.s- a process. He is not bond or free, 
 rational or irrational ; but he is moving from 
 promise to fulfilment, in so far as he is true
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 39 
 
 to himself. He is hecoming free, and acquiring 
 reason ; and it is only be cause he can become, 
 that we can call him eit her free or rati onal. 
 
 Now, there is a period in the life of man 
 — and likewise in the history of human society, 
 in the large letters of which man's nature 
 is most clearly read — when it is hard to detect 
 within him even the promise of freedom, so 
 tender is the green blade. We find him sunk 
 in sense, the victim of his immediate wants, 
 the willing, nay, rather, the unconscious, bonds- 
 man of powers which he has not recognized. 
 Choice of a kind there always is. He assimi- 
 lates what he selects. He turns his lips to a 
 good he does not know as the plants turn 
 toward the light, or the child feels for its 
 mother's breast. Nor is it merely sensuous 
 good that he thus blindly seeks ; but the 
 rational soul, which he is, also feels for its 
 
 nutriment. And, doubtless, 
 
 'He 
 Who fills the mother's breast with innocent milk, 
 Doth also for our nobler part provide, 
 Under His great correction and control, 
 As innocent instincts, and as innocent food.'^ 
 ^ Wordsworth's Prelude.
 
 40 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 But man's choice at first is amongst matters 
 
 small, although essential ; it moves within the 
 
 narrow range of sensible affections and sensuous 
 
 needs, amongst alternatives prescribed with 
 
 his consent unasked and his assent unconscious. 
 
 It concerns him greatly — does it not ? — whether 
 
 he be born of vicious or of virtuous parents, 
 
 amidst affluence or utter poverty ; whether he 
 
 enters on the scene of life amongst the Lake- 
 
 e ^as iLz. dwellers, or in the twentieth century and 
 
 l^Ptce. aO) amongst a people which is civilized. Yet, in 
 
 ""^ . ''^ these matters he has no choice; and none will 
 
 /Icc^j i\ deny that they determine the main range and 
 
 laryyi-i^ 
 
 if^h^e-cri.'im. or^ quality of his life. 
 
 '^dL ^ji >elf Born in his own place and time and heir of 
 his parents' strain he is still not free — if 
 freedom means to be emancipate. For, around 
 his spirit there presses continuously an all- 
 encompassing spiritual atmosphere. We find 
 him, not in early life only but not infrequently 
 throughout his days, without question on his 
 part or the faintest notion of demurring, satu- 
 rated with his people's ways of life. ' His 
 language is the language of his people.' His
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 41 
 
 opinions and habits, in great things and in 
 small, are the habits and opinions of his 
 neighbours. He has nothing of 'his own.' He 
 has borrowed his tastes, his morals and his 
 creed. The world of traditions and customs 
 into which he is born are assimilated bv him 
 as he grows ; they enter into his life, become 
 his experience, and constitute the very structure 
 of his soul. He has invented nothing : he has 
 invited nothing : he has but culled from that 
 which was provided. The general life flows 
 around him like the deep sea, and fills the 
 shell of his spirit to overflowing. He is 
 content to learn and obey, comprehending little 
 of the ' loud prophetic blast ' of the vast social 
 harmony in which his own voice feebly mingles. 
 Even when he strives to understand his people's 
 life, and to criticise his times, he does so 
 under conditions which they have determined 
 and with a mind which they themselves have 
 formed. Indeed , tliey criticise themselves in 
 him. He is their instrument. In him they 
 a^^ear as thinking and willing, and he is 
 mighty only through their presence. Not the
 
 
 42 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 most revolntionary .spirit risen in revolt against 
 his age escapes its power, nor can it strike its 
 age except with its weapons. And on the 
 other hand, the best achievement of the wisest 
 men is but to apprehend the meaning of their 
 time and adopt its deeper purposes. Reform 
 '1^ is evolution, and proj)hecy is insight. They 
 j5VLA^cj) s ^^^ ^j^^ discovery and the use of the perma- 
 
 tcn^a- nent tendencies, a borrowing of the forces of 
 
 the living world, in order to help the world 
 to overcome itself. 
 
 Not more conscious, or less obedient to 
 laws which it does not deliberately choose or 
 understand, is a people as a whole, as it 
 gradually compacts itself into the rational 
 system of the Political State, with its one life 
 and many aims and institutions. A people 
 becomes, and sustains itself as a community, 
 realizing more or less imperfectly a good that 
 is common, without knowing what it is doing. 
 A nation is a ' Complex of Human Forces and 
 Individualities hurled forth, to act and react, 
 on circumstances and on one another ; to work 
 out what it is in them to work. The thing
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 43 
 
 they will do is known to no man ; least of all 
 to themselves. It is the inflammable^ im- 
 measurable Fire-work, generating, consuming 
 itself. With what phases, to what extent, with 
 what results it will burn off, Philosophy and 
 Perspicacity conjecture in vain.'^ Trackless, 
 in very truth, has been the path of man's 
 history. He has set forth on the greatest of 
 all his quests, namely that of living in a 
 common bond of freedom with his fellows, like 
 the gier-eagle 
 
 'Stooping at once 
 
 Into the vast and unexplored abyss, 
 . . . strenuously beating 
 
 The silent, boundless regions of the sky.' 
 
 There is law here also, beyond all doubt. 
 Accident compiles nothing : accident is only 
 a word which men employ when they are 
 ignorant of the cause. But although the law 
 is there and operative it is all unknown to 
 those who follow it : the architect's plan enters 
 not into the thoughts of those who work upon 
 the rising walls of the social fabric. It is 
 
 ^Carlyle, French Rev., Bk. vii. Chap. iv. 
 
 Coo t(^bc .
 
 44 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 built up in the course of the petty commerce 
 of will with will, as men exchange satisfactions 
 and mutually awaken wants. From the mere 
 need to live, and to be let live, arise slowly 
 the beneficent customs and usages of a common 
 life, a mutual trust and a will towards public 
 justice ; and, little by little, they clothe them- 
 selves in moral ways of life and stable institu- 
 tions. Men, at first, as they come together 
 or find themselves together, in early society, 
 have little knowledge of any other good than 
 that of mere living. But 
 
 'By the impressive discipline of fear, 
 By pleasure and repeated happiness, 
 So frequently repeated, and by force 
 Of obscure feelings representative 
 Of things forgotten,' 
 
 they are led to achieve ends which they have 
 not even desired and to attain forms of good 
 which they do not recognize till they are 
 already in their hands. It was not Saul alone, 
 as it has been well said, * who went forth to 
 seek his father's asses and found a kingdom.' 
 This is the history of the human race.
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 45 
 
 When we contemplate such facts as these, 
 we cannot be surprised that men have magnified 
 ' the unconscious reason of the world,' and found 
 its working within the spirit of man far more 
 excellent than any conscious mind or deliberate 
 purpose of his own. ' The only results which 
 reason can claim as hers by an exclusive title 
 are of the nature of logical conclusions,' ^ says 
 Mr. Balfour. And how trifling are these when 
 compared with the all-pervading influences 
 which flow from ' Authority ' — which is the 
 name Mr. Balfour gives to tradition. - ^ j 
 
 "If we are to judge wijbh-" equity between 
 these rival clainiaiit§,,--we must not forget that 
 it is Authoritymther than Reason to which, 
 in the main, we owe, not religion only, but 
 ethics and politics ; that it is Authority which 
 supplies us with essential elements in the pre- 
 mises of Science ; that it is Authority rather 
 than Reason which lays deep the foundations 
 of social life ; that it is Authority rather than 
 Reason which cements its superstructure. And 
 though it may seem to savour of paradox, it 
 
 ^ FoundatioTis of Beliefs 1st edition, p. 212.
 
 4G IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 is yet no exaggeration to say, that if we would 
 find the quality in which we most notably 
 excel the brute creation, we should look for it, 
 not so much in our faculty of convincing and 
 being convinced by the exercise of reasoning, 
 as in our capacity for influencing and being 
 vt jl^vt J*::: influenced through the action of Authority."^ 
 ■oruK-v <3j- .LTV- ]^arrow, indeed, on his view would be the 
 thoughts, and confused the purposes, of a man 
 who believed nothing and sought no good 
 which he could not justify by means of reason. 
 Keason has a most petty rdle in human afiairs. 
 It serves nothing except to receive, arrange, 
 register, and transmit the traditions which are 
 the real substance of man's experience. Reason 
 is a ' formal ' faculty — the curator of a museum 
 who catalogues and labels treasures that are 
 not his own. Nor is it matter of regret that 
 its ' rdle is petty. ' ' Reasoning is a force most 
 apt to divide and disintegrate ; and though 
 division and disintegration may often be the 
 necessary preliminaries of social development, 
 still more necessary are the forces which bind 
 
 ^Ibid. pp. 229, 230.
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 47 
 
 and stiffen, without which there would be no 
 society to develop.'^ 
 
 We hear the same news of human reason 
 from another charming writer on philosophy. 
 Our conscious life, for Professor William James, 
 is incomparably less rich in meaning and of 
 less consequence in practice than is the sub- 
 conscious life upon which it rests. The real 
 forces of our life are out of sight. Our con- 
 sciousness is a feeble luminary whose light 
 makes a little circle on the surface of an 
 unfathomable ocean with whose heaving we 
 rise and fall, and whose unexplored depths hide 
 the determining passions and the elemental 
 impulses of our being. 
 
 Now, there is truth, but there is also mis- 
 chievous error in these views. Let us try to 
 disentangle them. It is true, as indeed we 
 have already recognized, that what a man is 
 he is in virtue of the traditions of his people. 
 Strip him of all of these and he stands piti- 
 fully naked and helpless. For these traditions 
 are not possessions from which he can divest 
 
 Ubid. 229.
 
 48 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 or disentangle himself. They are his experience, 
 and a man's experience enters into and becomes 
 the very substance of his rational life. It is 
 operative in all that he does. He can no more 
 set aside his experience when he is distinguish- 
 ing error from truth, right from wrong, or what 
 has, from what has not, aesthetic value, than 
 he can in manhood exercise the judgment or 
 the tastes of his childhood. The self, at any 
 moment, is not an abstract entity, or core 
 seated at the centre of his experience ; it is the 
 organized and living system of his past acts 
 of willing, desiring, knowing, and feeling. For 
 although the acts themselves have passed away 
 one by one, the doing of them has struck 
 inwards in each instance and has modified the 
 self for ever more. The self, in a word, is a 
 living and operative memory : memory which, 
 so far from being the resuscitation of dead or 
 sleeping ideas, is experience repeating itself, the 
 very self iterating its operations. 
 
 There is also a sense in which the sub- 
 conscious life of man is far more rich than his 
 conscious. No effort of reflective thought will
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 49 
 
 enable him fully to reconstruct liis inner life. 
 He knows himself only in part, as he knows 
 other objects only in part. Nowhere does his 
 plummet reach bottom. 
 
 Lastly, I would allow that tradition, which is 
 the experience of his people, is wiser as well as 
 wider than his own. He can appropriate only 
 limited aspects of it. Nay, he is capable of 
 incompletely exercising his own experience, and 
 thereby of falling below himself This, as a rule, 
 is what is meant by action from passion. It 
 is to neglect, or to refuse, to put the act in a 
 wide context. Had the young man, tempted 
 to do wrong, asked how his unworthy purpose 
 would affect his life as a whole — his relation to 
 his father or mother, and to the totality of the 
 connexions in which he stands to his fellows, 
 the temptation would have lost its power and 
 relaxed its hold. The power of passion over 
 him is due to his shutting himself in with it, 
 excluding the wide, sane world. 
 
 Nevertheless, it does not follow that tradi- 
 tion, wide and intimate as are its content, is 
 in itself better than reason, or has a rightful
 
 50 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 authority to silence its voice. The fact is that 
 the distinction between them is false and their 
 opposition factitious. The tradition of any age 
 is, after all, the product and result of the 
 rational activities of its predecessor. Whence 
 has tradition come ? How has it started upon 
 its way '? What compacted it at first, and what 
 sustains it ? Customs do not arise of themselves, 
 nor do opinions and creeds grow like weeds. 
 Great and powerful as a people's tradition is, 
 it has been built up, like coral islands amidst 
 the deep, from the many little reasons and 
 insignificant purposes of insignificant men. 
 There is no customary opinion which was not 
 once a bold conception, and no habit which 
 was not at one time a venturous enterprise. 
 Reason built tradition, and reason alone receives 
 and transmits it. Brutes have instincts, but not 
 traditions : for though they may be conscious, 
 they are not self-conscious. They can not by 
 reflexion make their own lives an object of 
 their thought, and so enlarge them. The whole 
 rich heritage of the traditions of a people is 
 ])ut as the bank whose wealth is all made up of
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 51 
 
 the many savings hoarded by its depositors little 
 by little at a time. 
 
 As to the contrast of the wisdom of tradition 
 with that of the individual's reason, whereby 
 the latter is so often rebuked and silenced, 
 that also conceals a fallacy. The comparison is 
 unjust. To make it just we must obviously 
 compare age with age, and individual with 
 individual. Then it will become less certain 
 that the world was wise only at the beginning 
 of things, and that it will be sane only if it 
 refuses to permit the individual to exercise his 
 faculties. To bind reason in chains at the feet 
 of tradition is to enslave it to its own past. 
 
 Nor is it reason that disrupts and disin- 
 tegrates ; it is the absence of reason, or its 
 inadequate exercise. A class of boys, set to 
 work a new exercise in arithmetic, will arrive at 
 different conclusions ; but let them learn more, 
 and they will agree. They come together in 
 the truth when they reason well. And it is 
 not otherwise with the affairs of life. It is not 
 by darkening the intelligence or by rendering 
 the reasoning powers of man inoperative that
 
 o2 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 we can hope to unite a people in the pursuit 
 of the ends which contain their welfare. The 
 vast order of the natural world is being re- 
 vealed to man, and the sphere of unintelligible 
 chaos is being confined by the combination of 
 the rational enquiries of many disinterested 
 minds, filled with passion for the truth. And 
 the order of society can be comprehended and 
 achieved by no other method. The uncertain, 
 tortuous and most expensive ways in which 
 at present the public welfare is sought is 
 evidence, not of the excessive but of the defec- 
 tive use of reason. We are paying the penalties 
 of the absence of rational research into the 
 principles of social welfare. Our social and 
 political life is the victim of blind experiment, 
 and we find the right way too often only by 
 trying first all the wrong ways and exhausting 
 the possibilities of error ; because it is the A^oice 
 of prejudice and passion which is most audible, 
 and because our statesmen devote themselves 
 to making followers by persuasion, rather than 
 to enquiry. We have no science of social life ; 
 and few, indeed, there be who seek it with
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 53 
 
 the sincere disinterestedness of the enquirers 
 into nature's realm. 
 
 The tradition of a people has its value ; but 
 only when it is taken up and made to live again 
 in the individual's thought and will. The sub- 
 conscious life of man is rich and great ; but 
 he comes into possession of none of its wealth 
 except that which breaks out into his conscious 
 mind and becomes his experience. All the rest 
 of it is like the mystery of the world which 
 lies around him, a territory unexplored, with 
 all its treasures beyond the range of use. For 
 value lies not in things themselves, but in 
 their use and comprehension. Australia, in 
 spite of its vast extent of rich soil and its 
 mountains veined with gold, was a poor con- 
 tinent, of no account in the world's mart, so 
 long as its inhabitants were savage. And the 
 traditions of the wisest ages are a meaningless 
 inheritance to the crude and ignorant. Of 
 what avail was the art of Greece or the polity 
 of Rome to the Goths and Vandals ? Verily, 
 they speak not wisely who would set tradition 
 above or against reason. It is to set the dead
 
 54 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 body above the life which sustains it, pro- 
 tecting it against disintegration and decay. 
 
 The truth of the situation thus proves, as 
 usual, to be complex. Tradition and reason 
 are elements which interpenetrate and can not 
 be sundered without being destroyed. The one 
 lives and grows in virtue of the other. If man 
 did not at first accept the beliefs and customs 
 of his people ; if he were not for a considerable 
 part of his life docile, assimilative and uncritical 
 of the rational habitudes of his time, receiving 
 his nutriment prepared, simplified and made 
 innocent from the larger life of the social 
 organism, even as a child takes its mother's 
 milk, reason could not be fostered within him. 
 His dependence in this respect is absolute, and 
 knows no limit. On the other hand, there is 
 no doubt that the life of the individual is from 
 the first his very own. At every stage 
 
 'Mind keeps her own 
 Inviolate retirement.' 
 
 Personality is always single, profoundly private 
 and enisled within itself. But it feeds on the 
 outer world, and needs the circumambient air
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 55 
 
 of the social sky. What the plenteous produce 
 of the earth is for man's physical organism, the 
 opinions and habits of his people are to his 
 spirit. The mighty energies which uphold the 
 community, maintaining its life unbroken 
 through the centuries, pass into his own life. 
 The substance of his soul is social. He is his 
 social world gathered into a new focus ; it is 
 individuated anew in his person. Of freedom, if 
 freedom means separation, there is none, except 
 in promise. The conditions of freedom may be, 
 and indeed are being, slowly gathered together. 
 But the spirit of detachment, criticism and 
 innovation is at first feeble : it is like the revolt 
 of the babe against its mother which brings 
 no cessation of love, or care or nutriment. No 
 society is so conservative as the society which 
 is crude, and no traditions are so inexpugnable, 
 or can live so long after all their meaning has 
 been lost, as those of a savage people. Progress 
 is a force that gathers acceleration as it goes ; 
 and in early society it is for ages together quite 
 undiscernible. 
 
 But a time surely comes to every man,
 
 56 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 according to his measure, when he ceases to 
 be the docile medium of the traditions of his 
 people. And when he moves he moves society. 
 Absolutely passive he never was ; the weakest 
 personality is never mere environment. Pure 
 activity he never becomes, for he never makes 
 all his environment his own, and his experience 
 to the end washes against rocks that bound it. 
 Man, in other words, is never utterly bond or 
 free. But the range of his choice widens and 
 his freedom grows. It is for that purpose that 
 society nurses him on her knees, ' He sucks 
 the breasts of the universal ethos ' that he 
 may some day walk about his own ways, and 
 survey the world with the fresh eyes of an 
 intelligence that is awake. Society lends to 
 him her wisdom, imparts to him the rational 
 elements of her own life, in order that by 
 means of them he may scrutinize her opinions, 
 challenge her faith, and reform her ways. 
 Otherwise, her customs would become stale and 
 her faith a lifeless creed. Social life would miss 
 its immortality, which comes, as Plato tells us, 
 only through constant generation. But the
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 57 
 
 intimacy of a man and his people is not broken, 
 any more than that of the wise father and his 
 grown-up son, — dutiful in his independence. 
 It is the spirit which has built up the social 
 world that becomes in its own members aware 
 of what it has achieved. By means of their 
 mind, it examines itself and achieves freedom. 
 It can now move onward, not, indeed, shaking 
 off its past, but consecrating it to new purposes 
 and making a stepping-stone of its dead self. 
 
 The first result of this change is a certain 
 loss of authority to the social world. It cannot 
 dogmatize any longer, and must exercise its 
 power in another way. Customs, beliefs, rules 
 of conduct, polities, institutions, creeds, which 
 were matters of course, stable as earth and sky 
 and apparently not more subject to man's 
 control, are now seen to be the products of 
 man's activities. Conceived at first to have 
 come from the Gods — for it is to the Gods that 
 every people, Jew and Gentile, Greek and bar- 
 barian, attribute the first institution of their 
 laws — they are found to have originated in 
 the warring passions and the groping reason of
 
 58 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 men. They are inventions, conventions, devices 
 which men have hit upon from time to time and 
 agreed about in order to live, and to live more 
 abundantly. Men have been broug^ht too;ether 
 into communities by their wants, and they are 
 held to^fyether by their mutual use. Utility has 
 built the State and utility may pull it down 
 again ; for when the spirit of man becomes 
 aware of its own might, it will assert its own 
 rights. What it has created it may also destroy, 
 if it pleases ; for the worker is ever greater 
 than his work. 
 
 Thus, there gradually grows up an inner 
 world of personal conviction and of private 
 rights. The individual constitutes himself into 
 the measure of all things, and the arbiter of 
 all values. The standard of truth and error 
 is his own judgment, and of right and wrong is 
 his own conscience. 
 
 At certain periods, and by certain individuals, 
 as in Athens and by the Sophists, this world 
 of inner conviction is set against the outer order 
 of objective law and custom. The authority of 
 the State is set at nought. This is the prize and
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 59 
 
 the penalty, tlie first bitter fruit of reflexion, 
 of that turning of the mind inward upon itself, 
 which philosophy is. In all ages of the world 
 the young philosopher, as Plato tells us, is like 
 the puppy-dog. He must tear things to pieces 
 while he is teething. There are men always, 
 on the way to wisdom and not yet arrived, 
 in whose ears, let the State and Church say 
 what they will, there is an inner voice which 
 keeps murmuring, which they think is all their 
 own. They will adopt no belief except that 
 which approves itself to them as true ; they 
 will obey no law which they do not think just; 
 they will lend themselves to no purpose which 
 they do not themselves approve ; and they 
 have no misgivings, for the world has shrunk 
 into the measure of their thoughts, and they 
 know not that their minds circle within a larger 
 system. 
 
 At such periods men make much of their 
 * Freedom,' and they construe Freedom as Inde- 
 pendence. Their attitude towards the social 
 world is negative. They will hold all its 
 influences at arm's length. They desire none
 
 60 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 of them. They want to be let alone to follow 
 the guidance of the inner light. Not only is 
 that light deemed all-sufficient ; it is taken to 
 be original and inborn. There are no moons 
 amongst minds in these periods ; all are stars, 
 self-poised and self-illumined. The tendencies 
 at work in human society at such times are 
 comparable to those we find in a family of 
 grown-up sons and daughters. There is a 
 trend towards disintegration, which may, if 
 powerful enough, leave the parents desolate on 
 a hearth grown strangely silent. The State 
 decays with inward feebleness and sinks within 
 itself, turning, like old age, from action to re- 
 flexion, and idly feeding itself on the memory 
 of past nobleness. A form of civilization, as 
 was the case in Greece, passes away to return 
 no more. And it is well if, as was again the 
 case wdth Greece and Israel, it leaves a record 
 of its experiences in a literature, from which 
 the newer world, patient of the past once 
 more, may strive to learn. 
 
 When judgment is passed upon such periods 
 as these it is all too apt to be abstract : one
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 61 
 
 critic sees naught but anarchy, another naught 
 but liberty. There is in truth neither because 
 there are both mutually modified. As usual 
 the error lies in not observing the positive 
 beneath the negative, the permanent truth 
 within the passing falsehood. The agents of 
 this new spirit of freedom, which is inter- 
 preted as independence, stray from the paths 
 of wisdom and of truth not in what they assert 
 but in what they deny. They do well in setting 
 a high price on private judgment and in 
 assigning to inner conscience an authority 
 which is supreme. But, in the last resort, 
 private judgment and the moral voice within 
 are worthy to be prized, not because they 
 are private, but because they stand as spokes- 
 men and plenipotentiaries of a Good that is 
 wider than is embodied in the objective order 
 of the State against which they are in revolt. 
 This truth is seen by the wiser spirits. It 
 was/ seen by Socrates but not by the Sophists, 
 by Burke but not by Bentham. The former 
 knew that ' men would never look forward to 
 ' posterity who did not look backward to their
 
 G2 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 ancestors,' and that tliey cannot serve the 
 world except by borrowing its powers. To 
 the latter the wisdom of our ancestors was ' the 
 infantile foolishness of the cradle of the race.' 
 Such contemners of the past would shut out 
 the experience of the world, not knowing that 
 in doing so they would shut in their souls on 
 emptiness. Their criticism appears to them to 
 emanate solely from within themselves, and they 
 are not aware that they have got their objec- 
 tions to society within society, and that no 
 man can rise above his age except by means 
 of it. 
 
 The successful founder of a new regime has^ 
 always been the devotee of the old. He has 
 been a more ardent disciple and a deeper lover 
 of the ancient ways than others. He makes 
 the hearts of his followers to burn within 
 them because he can open the ancient scrip- 
 tures of his people. He has come not to 
 destroy, but to fulfil. He brings to light the 
 better meaning of the ancient faith, and by 
 evolving the present from the past sets free 
 the future. He gives articulate voice to the
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 63 
 
 dim yearnings of his people, and liberates the 
 ideals surging darkly in their heart. 
 
 The true reformer is always a generous spirit. 
 So far from feeding on the errors of his time, 
 or condemning its institutions, he takes their 
 part against their lower selves and declares 
 war only against their corruption. No great 
 reformation either in politics or in religion 
 has ever arisen from the spirit of negation : 
 negation is only an accident and bye-product. 
 The true reformer of either Church or State 
 does not aim at overturning them, and it is 
 not his desire to establish others in their 
 place. He would relieve the Church of en- 
 crusted falsehoods, he would deliver his country 
 from the wrongs which it inflicts upon itself. 
 He battles for the ideal which is already in the 
 world, and asjainst the accidental forms which 
 cramp it. He is not less but more loyal than 
 his fellows ; and he chastises because he loves. 
 
 Hence it is always against his will that he 
 finds himself in opposition to the constituted 
 authorities. He is forced into it ; for the error 
 which he attacks is not recognized as an
 
 64 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 error by others, and they come up to its 
 support. Moreover, all errors are partial truths, 
 and all social wrongs are entangled with the 
 right, and part of the fabric of the general 
 customs. The ancient ways of a people die 
 hard, and their soul is not easily released from 
 the forms in which it has embodied itself. 
 The State and the Church resist reforms, and 
 the world as it is takes the side of its errors, 
 not because it prefers falsehood to truth, or 
 right to wrong, but because the error and the 
 wrongs are part of their structure. They can- 
 not be removed, as the reformer generally finds, 
 without endangering the whole edifice. This is 
 why there falls upon him the hardest fate of 
 all, namely, his estrangement from good men. 
 Hence also the world is at all times apt to 
 crucify its saviours, not knowing what it doth. 
 For it is in their loyalty to the good which 
 is visible in the world that in one age they 
 slay their prophets — ' the seers ' of the good 
 not yet come — and build their sepulchres in 
 the next. 
 
 Thus, in the last resort, the web of human
 
 FREEDOM: FIRST THE BLADE 65 
 
 history shews no rent ; its deepest changes, as 
 indeed must be, are changes of the permanent. 
 Nor is such a dissolution of continuity the 
 condition of freedom. It does not bring in- 
 dependence even, but much helplessness. ' Man 
 lives not except with formulas, with customs, 
 ivays of doing and living. Uhi homines sunt 
 modi sunt. There are modes wherever there 
 are men. It is the deepest law of human 
 nature, whereby man is a craftsman and tool- 
 using animal ; not the slave of Impulse, Chance, 
 and brute Nature, but in some measure their 
 lord.' ^ 
 
 Nevertheless the change which ensues during 
 the conflict of the hero and his age often 
 strains the social tissue to the uttermost. The 
 controversy spreads far beyond any particular 
 question of right which happens to be in 
 dispute between the hero — be he prophet, priest, 
 or statesman — and his times. At certain periods, 
 when what we have called the stage of negative 
 freedom, or ' Independence ' is first reached, the 
 universal issue is raised of the relation of the 
 
 ^Carlyle'a French Rev., in. ii. 1. 
 E
 
 6G IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 individual to the outer powers. Shall he obey 
 them, or they him ? Where is the final 
 authority : is it within or without ? Does it 
 lie in the inner order of the individual con- 
 science, or in the outer order of the Church 
 and State ? Has the individual at any time 
 the right to challenge and overturn the social 
 order ? Has the State at all times the right 
 to overrule the action of its members, and can 
 it at any time invade the territory of their 
 inner life ? Or has each of them a particular 
 province within which it may rule supreme ? 
 If so, who shall fix the boundaries, or say to its 
 rival, ' Thus far thou comest, and not further ? ' 
 
 When this question has been fairly raised 
 the banner of freedom is in very fact unfurled. 
 Men slowly rank themselves around it, nation 
 by nation, age by age, and strive to make 
 their footing good against all despotic and 
 alien powers, whether they be the powers of 
 Nature or the State, — or even of ' a divinity 
 not themselves ' — making for righteousness. 
 
 It is to this controversy that we must turn 
 in our next lecture.
 
 III. 
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR. 
 
 The Eastern peoples lave no genius for Statecraft : The 
 Greeks discover the Free State : The Greek State a 
 product of the Imagination ; its characteristics ; a social 
 paradise : Reflective thought is born, and destroys the 
 product of the Imagination : The Greek Sophists : 
 Socrates exercised a stronger destructive power than all 
 the Sophists ; for he endowed the individual conscience 
 with universal rights : The growth of the spirit of free- 
 dom, shatters its outward forms ; the old institutions 
 perish and humanity is launched on a new enterprise : 
 Both the inner aud the outer law are absolute : Their 
 conflict ; its phases exhibited in Stoicism and Christianity, 
 in Romati Catholicism and in Protestantism : Why free- 
 dom comes tardily and must take many forms : Emanci- 
 pation is negative and only the alphabet of true freedom : 
 It reached its full expression in the French Revolution : 
 The preference of Aaron to Moses : Napoleon and 
 Demoiselle Chaumette : No leaps in moral and political 
 wisdom ; and reconstruction must begin at the bottom 
 and run up the whole scale : The new freedom restores 
 the ancient world but reinterprets it :_ The prophets of 
 the New Age and its practical bu^ia^ss.
 
 /
 
 III. 
 
 FEEEDOM: THEN THE EAR. 
 
 It is generally recognized, I believe, that only 
 the Western World has shewn any genius for 
 statecraft or any strong impulse towards 
 political freedom. In the East, says Hegel, we 
 find ' despotisms developed in magnificent 
 proportions': sovereign lords to whose will 
 there was no limit, save their own caprice 
 or superstition, ruling over peoples who were 
 conscious of no political rights. Only one 
 man was ' free. ' He had rights and no duties, 
 while his subjects had the one all-inclusive 
 duty of absolute obedience. Even in the 
 history of Israel, to which modern civilization 
 is in some respects most indebted of all, we 
 find little promise of free institutions, and no 
 conception of government except that which
 
 70 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 was rooted in the will of a despotic God, 
 priest, or king. Nor is it otherwise to-day 
 amongst the vast and varied populations of 
 India. The supreme obstacle, which threatens 
 to frustrate the British people in attempting 
 to educate them into self-government, lies in 
 the fact that they can hardly be taught to 
 rule except as despots, or to obey except as 
 slaves. Modern history presents no more 
 interesting spectacle, or more doubtful enter- 
 prise, than this of inoculating these Eastern 
 peoples with the spirit of the West. 
 
 The first experiment in political freedom was 
 made in Greece ; and amongst all the discoveries 
 of that wonderful people there was none so 
 great as the discovery of the ide a of a Stat e^^ 
 founded upon the freedom of its members. 
 None certainly has brought a greater array of 
 beneficent consequences in its train. It was in 
 virtue of it that they broke the brooding quiet 
 of a world stagnated, and introduced into it, 
 for the first time according to Sir Henry 
 Maine, the very idea of progress. 
 
 How to account for their discovery we do
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 71 
 
 not know. Hegel suggests that it sprang from 
 the temper of the people, which was like that 
 of the artist, — ' a free individuality, conditioned 
 by beauty.' But, of course, when one speaks 
 thus of the ' temper or disposition ' of a people, 
 all that is meant is that we lose sight of the 
 determining cause amongst a complex totality of 
 elements. These terms are merely limiting con- 
 ceptions, and a confession of ignorance. Free, 
 spontaneous, joyous, the Greeks certainly were ; 
 and they were creatively impelled, as artists are, 
 to impress their own imaginative conceptions 
 upon outward things. Imagination is essentially 
 free, and a ruling lord in its own domain : it 
 always finds its material plastic, and saturates 
 it with itself. Hence, while the spirit of the 
 East was submerged in nature, and individu- 
 ality was overwhelmed, the Greeks looked at 
 the world with the frank and fearless eyes of 
 youth. They were neither Nature-worshippers 
 nor Pantheists. They peopled Olympus with 
 fair humanities, and kept Destiny in the back- 
 ground. Their religion was as the sunlight. 
 Their Gods were ' ideal figures, fixed like
 
 72 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 statues in the eternal repose of beauty,' and 
 they mingled freely in the affairs of men. 
 
 For the same reason the Greek State was 
 just ' the individual writ large.' It was not 
 an awesome and alien entity, or abstract power, 
 elevated above the citizen and endowed with 
 mysterious authority, in whose face he dared 
 not look. He saw in it only the replica of 
 himself Originally the Greek State was so 
 intimately at one with the citizens themselves 
 that in seeking its good they never conceived 
 that they were serving a foreign power. Indeed, 
 at this stage neither their moral nor their 
 political ends came before them as duties. The 
 Greeks, says Hegel, 'had no conscience.' They 
 had fine impulses, 'i'hey served their country 
 without reflexion, with the same spontaneous 
 naturalness with which they served themselves. 
 ' Their object was their country in its living 
 and real aspect — this actual Athens, this Sparta, 
 these Temples, these Altars, this form of social 
 life, this union of fellow-citizens, these manners 
 and customs. To the Greek his country was 
 a necessary of life, without which existence
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 73 
 
 was impossible. ' ^ In short, if their politics were 
 not moralized, after the manner of the best 
 periods in our own history, their morals were 
 socialized to a degree which we have not as 
 yet rivalled. 
 
 No conditions could be more favourable to 
 the birth of political freedom than those 
 furnished by the imaginative spirit of the 
 Greeks. Nevertheless, this first experiment in 
 freedom was timid in character, limited in 
 scale, and of short duration. The Greek State 
 was small in extent : it was only a free city. 
 Its citizens were few, and the slaves were 
 many. Its basis was so narrow, and its mem- 
 bers so volatile, that it was constantly in danger 
 of toppling over into despotism. The very 
 sentiment of equality rendered it insecure. If 
 from time to time the people ' placed their 
 confidence in men of plastic genius, calling a 
 Solon or Lycurgus to legislate for them, or 
 placing a Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides, or 
 Pericles at the head of their affairs, as soon as 
 any of these great men had performed what 
 
 ^ Hegel's Philosophy of History.
 
 74 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 was needed, envy intruded — i.e. the recoil of 
 the sentiment of equality against conspicuous 
 talent — and he was either imprisoned or 
 exiled.'^ 
 
 The Greek State, in fact, was the supreme 
 instance of enlightened comradeship. Every one 
 was free and equal to his neighbour ; and the 
 question of rights was not raised. For the 
 most part they lived together in the city, and 
 saw each other daily. In times of danger they 
 could all take refuge within its walls. More- 
 over, any citizen could hold any office. * He 
 must be present at the critical stages of public 
 business ; he must take part in decisive crises 
 with his entire personality — not with his vote 
 merely ; he must mingle in the heat of action — 
 the passion and the interest of the whole man 
 being absorbed in the affair.' ^ 
 
 A fairer state than the Greek State at its 
 best, as it was in Athens at the time of Pericles, 
 has never been seen amongst mankind. But it 
 is evident that it was not capable of expansion. 
 Least of all could it exhibit the full implications 
 
 ^Ibid. Ubid.
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 75 
 
 of freedom. It was like a paradise to which 
 mau will always look back with longing, but 
 which he must leave as soon as the quarrel 
 between nature and spirit breaks out, and right 
 is distinguished from wrong. 
 
 And herein lies the second supremely inter- 
 esting aspect of the Greek State, namely, that 
 it did lose the paradisaical form which it possessed 
 as a product of imagination and as the expression 
 of the innocence of natural impulse. The Greek 
 spirit, as I have already hinted in a previous 
 lecture, looking at all things with frank and 
 fearless eyes, became in due course aw^are of 
 its own activity. It found itself to be supreme. 
 Mind was the ordering power in the world ; 
 and in man himself was hidden the solution 
 of the enigma of being. To ' know himself,' 
 therefore, was his first duty. Thought turned 
 inwards upon itself, became reflective ; con- 
 sciousness emerged as self-consciousness, impulse 
 and instinct as deliberate purpose and will. 
 
 Now, reflective or self-conscious thought is 
 at first inimical to the imagination. It hobbles 
 its spontaneity with criticism and brings hesita-
 
 70 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 tion in place of confidence ; it substitutes analy- 
 sis for synthetic construction, and abstractions 
 for sensible concrete products. Above all it 
 introduces for the first time a contrast between 
 the true and false, the right and the wrong, 
 the permanent reality and the passing show : 
 contrasts with which the imagination has nothing 
 to do. Who cares whether Cordelia or Imogen 
 ever lived, or whether a painting is or is not 
 a portrait ? A work of art has its own truth, 
 but it has nothing to do with the context of 
 the wider world : it is enough if it be fair, 
 standing out justified by its own beauty.^ You 
 cannot universalize a work of art ; the sensuous 
 element, which is always particular, is as essen- 
 tial to it as the idea which lives and breathes, 
 half- revealed and half-concealed, within it. 
 
 When reflexion was set loose upon the political 
 state of Greece, and the rectitude of its claims 
 and foundations of its authority over its mem- 
 bers came to be investigated, it was doomed. 
 ^V5unded on impulse, it could not stand the^ 
 
 ' ' The artistically true and the naturally true are entirely 
 distinct,' says Goethe.
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 77 
 
 strain of thouglit. Hence the ethical enquiries 
 of Socrates were fatal to the Greek State, more 
 fatal even than those of the Sophists. It is 
 true that the Sophists had found ' Man to be 
 the measure of all things,' and his rights to be 
 unlimited. But though the will that would 
 destroy the outer order was in their teaching, 
 the power was not. For the individual whom 
 they set against the State had no better content 
 than caprice. He might think what he pleased 
 and will what he pleased, and anything he 
 pleased would be true and right for him. But 
 for the same reason they might be false and 
 wrong to his neighbour. Each man's domain 
 terminated within himself, and there w^as nothing 
 at his back to sustain him. But it was other- 
 wise with Socrates. He had the same conviction 
 as the Sophists of the primacy of individuality, 
 but he had a far deeper intuition of its signifi- 
 cance. For him the rights of individuality lay, 
 not in its singularity or caprice, but in its uni- 
 versal nature. Mind, or Spirit, had the intrinsic 
 capacity for deciding questions of right and 
 wrong, truth and falsehood, in a way that was
 
 78 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 final, because it was valid for all. Socrates 
 strove to bring his fellow-citizens to recognize, 
 not only that Virtue is knowledge, and that 
 every man must know the right in order to 
 do it ; but also that Virtue has a universal 
 character. It implies knowledge of a Good 
 which was good in itself, supreme, lifted above 
 the power of the individual to challenge or 
 change. 
 
 Here then there is brought to light, for the 
 first time, the sovereign nature of conscience. 
 It was not only an authority which claimed, 
 but it had the right to claim, precedence over 
 every other authority — be it use and wont, or 
 a political law and institution. Socrates was 
 condemned to death as the enemy of the State, 
 and the sentence, says Hegel, ' bears the aspect 
 of unimpeachable rectitude.' The Greek State 
 was not put together on principles that could 
 sustain the stress, or give room for the play of 
 individualities which were so ample and so 
 fortified in their claims of freedom. Its loyalties 
 were too narrow, its duties too confined, and 
 its privileges too exclusive. The State could pre-
 
 ; 
 
 I TV C.~i OX' 
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 79 
 
 scribe loyalty only to Athens, or only to Sparta, 
 
 or, at the widest, only to the Greeks — never to 
 
 the barbarian, or to man as man. There were 
 
 also slaves within it, and slavery was essential to r 
 
 it. Hence, the teachings of Socrates were fatal ^.cn-^ I 
 
 to the Greek State. The spirit of freedom, ^. "' ^ 
 
 growing apace, shattered the political form in^,^. ' n , -, 
 
 which it was confined ; ' as an oak-plant shatters ^-^^^.^ ^ucvf.-fei. 
 
 a flower pot.' It had, thereafter, to find, or 
 
 rather to form, an outward political order more 
 
 adequate to itself; and mankind is launched 
 
 on a new and vast enterprise, namely, that of 
 
 reconciling absolute inner freedom with the 
 
 absolute rule of objective law. 
 
 This transition from sense to thought, and 
 from impulse to conscious will, or rather this 
 sublimation by internal evolution of the former 
 into the latter, is the most momentous step in 
 the history of man's spirit. It is not abrupt : 
 it is prepared for. It is the result of a slow 
 ripening, that is of constant decay and re-birth, 
 in which something is always passing away 
 and something new, rooted in the old, is always 
 appearing. Its stages are so gradual that they
 
 80 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 can hardly be discerned. And yet there takes 
 place a momentous revolution, or a series of 
 revolutions. One day there is the blind bud, 
 the next the open blossom, the next the fruit 
 — each a surprise. 
 
 When sensuous knowledge and impulse 
 blossom into self-conscious thought and purpose, 
 man comes of age, and is ruler in his own 
 
 ^*^V 'house. He is manifestly endowed with a new 
 
 iirJr^LU^^^^'-^ privilege, and the privilege is the first thing 
 
 ^^" ' 'v of which he is conscious. But he is also laden 
 
 r^ ^'^'r^i •/- "^^^^ ^ ^^^ responsibility. He has the duty, 
 inCic^^'-f'^ as well as the right of private judgment; the 
 
 a i(to«> ^^'"^ peril as well as the privilege of being free. 
 And in the last resort, the privilege and the 
 right will be maintained only if he can rise to 
 the height of the duty. The right of private 
 judgment is after all only the right of passing 
 a judgment which is just; and the right to be 
 free is not the right to be capricious. It is the 
 right to will in accord with the will of the 
 whole, and therefore to find the nature of things 
 to be, not an obstruction, but a power on its 
 side. For this alone is freedom. v^'-ft->v ofM^iir 
 
 acts a cL etc LTx^'^n. '>'■ <^- ''-''• 
 
 M.V'-C--
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 81 
 
 Freedom has tlius two aspects, both of them 
 of infinite value and, in the last resort, incapable 
 of any limitation or compromise. Both the 
 inner and the outer law must be supreme. 
 The voice of conscience and the voice of God 
 are both authoritative, and they must be in 
 agreement. The law of rational life must be 
 self-imposed^, and yet its imperatives must be 
 categorijofll. 
 
 Hhl man histo r y is the arena wherein t hese 
 two powers come together , now in conflict, now 
 in agreement, now in new conflict, and in new 
 agreement. The peace of the natural life having 
 been broken, and the political unions in which 
 it first manifested itself having been destroyed — 
 the civic States of Greece and the sublime 
 theocracy of Israel having proved incapable of 
 standing the strain of the universal truth that 
 was working within them, a truth which con- 
 cerned the destiny of all mankind — we find 
 the Imperialism of Rome erected on their ruins. 
 This was a monster State which had no bowels 
 of compassion for the minor loyalties of national 
 life, but with a proud indifterence it destroyed 
 
 F
 
 82 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 all which it did not ignore. It was just, but 
 not merciful, extending its power above the 
 nations like a steel sky. It was an abstraction 
 in which the heart of man could not delight, 
 and which was deaf to his prayers. Moreover 
 it became corrupt, and faith in the objective 
 order died within man. He must seek refuge 
 elsewhere : in himself, said Stoicism ; in a city 
 beyond the skies, said Christianity. Both of 
 them, each in its own way, sought to wean 
 man from the world, for it was an empty 
 appearance to the indifference of the one, and 
 to the other a place all alien, in which men 
 with an eternal mission in their hearts were 
 pilgrims and sojourners. Christianity joined 
 its unresisting meekness and the virtues of 
 resignation to the enduring pride of Stoicism, 
 and, with nothing revolutionary in its aims, it 
 sapped the strength of the imperial institutions. 
 Only at such a cost could ' the Kingdom of 
 Heaven ' be built within, and the spirit of man 
 be set free to walk in the rays of its own light. 
 
 But it is an error to regard this movement 
 as purely negative. Man cannot live amongst
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 83 
 
 negations. Every new step which was gained 
 in freedom, every new truth which came to be 
 recognized, could be made valid only if it 
 embodied itself in an external form. The ideals 
 of man must have habitations in which to 
 dwell, else they lapse back into empty aspirations 
 and disappear like smoke in air. ' The word 
 must be made flesh.' Ideas must become 
 practice, use and wont, stable laws and institu- 
 tions. A visible Church had to grow, and it 
 had to build its own institutions in the world 
 and hold some commerce with it. Ultimately 
 it had to conquer the Empire, and to risk its own 
 spiritual life in the process, becoming itself a 
 secular power, wielding secular weapons, and 
 oppressing the Spirit of man once more. Nega- 
 tive forces had to come into play again ; for 
 Protestantism was at first a ' protest,' however 
 we may regard its later history and its future. 
 Thus do we find two laws always operative. 
 In the first place, inner and outer freedom 
 grow together ; for the former must always 
 express itself in the latter. In the second 
 place, the spirit of freedom as it grows must
 
 84 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 set up new obstructions to its own progress. 
 The spirit is living, an activity that does not 
 rest, a process which does not stop ; but it 
 must take forms that are fixed. It must 
 express itself in habits, in laws and institu- 
 tions, — vestments which must grow old and 
 be cast off again ; for ' good customs corrupt 
 the world ' in becoming customs. 
 
 It is no marvel, therefore, that the march 
 towards freedom has been slow, or that the 
 footprints of man's history are stained with 
 blood. Nothing else can be expected from his 
 intrinsic nature. ' The first man is of the 
 earth, earthy,' steeped in sense, and impulse 
 is his only law. But he is meant to wear 
 on his brow the crown of spirit ; to reign as 
 king over his own impulses and to subject 
 the world to obedience. To the natural man, 
 the crown of spirit is, indeed, a crown of 
 thorns, worn on the way to death. If he has 
 not to destroy his natural impulses by ascetic 
 ways of life, he has to convert them into 
 vehicles and instruments of purposes which are 
 spiritual — which is still more difficult. If he
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 85 
 
 has not to abandon the beneficent usages of 
 a life within society, he has to transmute 
 their meaning by referring them to an inner 
 law, and to lift them into duties. If he still 
 follows paths worn easy for his feet by the 
 multitudes which have gone before, remaining 
 a loyal citizen amongst his people, he must 
 also venture the untried. For the moral life 
 is all a lonely enterprise, and there is no 
 light upon the way, except that which shines 
 from the inner law of clutifulness and reverence 
 for the right. 
 
 When we turn from the individual to the 
 State we see the same spectacle of a freedom 
 which comes tardily and with infinite toil. It 
 is demanded within the State at first only by 
 the few, in regard to a few matters, and in 
 a small degree ; and these few find all their 
 world ranged against them. If the consciousness 
 of the Might of Spirit and of the inevitableness 
 of its victory leads the hero, in an inspired 
 moment, to proclaim that ' he has overcome 
 the world,' he is aware at the same time that 
 his victory is gained only in principle. The
 
 8(> IDEALISxM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 ' whole mass ' has yet to be leavened. The 
 new principle has to become first the aspiration 
 and then the habit of the many ; and men are 
 sluggish, and the sleep of sense is deep. 
 
 Further, freedom has in the long run to 
 take many forms, and to master many kinds 
 of resistance. It must be religious freedom, 
 as well as moral freedom. And to this end, 
 knowledge must oust superstition, love must 
 cast out fear, the bondsman must become a 
 Son, and God a Father. Man must claim to 
 hold immediate converse with his God, the 
 finite with the infinite : his God shall grant 
 it ; and man, seeing God face to face, shall 
 find, not death, but life. 
 
 It must also be social and political freedom : 
 a form of government and a mode of life in 
 which a whole people seeks a common good, 
 which is alone a true Democracy. For Demo- 
 cracy is much more than a claim to rule on the 
 part of all the people. It is the consciousness 
 of the obligation and the privilege of service. 
 It is 'a Kingdom of ends,' to use the great 
 phrase of Kant, ' in which all are sovereigns
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 87 
 
 and all are subjects' — a form of public life 
 not clearly conceived as yet, far less attained by 
 any community. 
 
 Such freedom as this — the freedom of perfect 
 service — has hardly become the conscious purpose 
 of any modern State so far. Our most generous 
 political impulses, so far, have too often as their 
 aim the freedom which is Emancipation, and 
 which is only the alphabet of true liberty. The 
 spirit of our most revolutionary socialism is, 
 as a matter of fact, deeply tainted with the 
 selfishness of Individualism. The aspiration is 
 still to endow individuals with the right and 
 the power to hold their own. Nor is this 
 wrong. Has not the lowest life the task of 
 maintaining itself against the whole environing 
 world, and of preventing forces which are foreign 
 from invading the sanctuary of its inner being ? 
 Negation, resistance against, and the exclusion 
 of, all that is alien, is a necessary condition 
 of the humblest individuality. Without this 
 self-assertion and repulsion, nothing could live 
 its own life. But these forces reach their crisis 
 in the life of Spirit. Mind ruthlessly excludes,
 
 88 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 nay reduces into meaninglessness and nonentity, 
 all that refuses to bend to its yoke. What 
 Spirit does not know or purpose is as good 
 as nothing for it : things come to he for it in 
 acquiring meaning. 
 
 But the freedom which is merely freedom 
 from the world is, we say, only a preliminary 
 stage of true liberty. The man who makes most 
 of his detached and irresponsible personality is 
 not free, but capricious. He is unjust to 
 himself, for the capricious spirit is the least 
 rational ; his pure independence is utter weak- 
 ness, and he is ungrateful to the world. The 
 objective order, physical and social, against 
 whose necessities he is in revolt, and from which 
 he desires to be free, is the world which has 
 nourished him. The laws and institutions he 
 would overthrow, the State which he would 
 overturn, — or, what is worse and more common 
 amongst both classes and masses, ruthlessly 
 use as mere means of private ends, — have 
 been to him a shelter and a refuge. But in 
 their ardour for emancipation and the energy 
 of the assertion of their Individuality men do
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 89 
 
 not remember this. The Church may have 
 fostered learning, cherished the virtues, shed 
 the light of eternity on the things of time ; 
 the State may have founded freedom, instituted 
 and protected every right of person and property 
 that the individual can claim or seek to enhance 
 — all this is forgotten. When the Spirit of 
 Individualism is abroad the stable strength and 
 the unobtrusive benevolence of the ancient 
 authorities seem to be in the way, a standing 
 obstacle to the one thing which is now desired, 
 namely freedom. The cry at such periods is 
 for Emancipation. The motto is ' Let me be,' 
 ' Laissez /aire ; laissez alter. ' The old ties 
 and loyalties have become irksome bonds. The 
 demos wishes to have its limbs free, to walk 
 if it can, unfettered by conventions. It will 
 have its own way, and follow its own thoughts, 
 at any cost and in any manner it pleases. It 
 will express its new-born liberty in literature and 
 all the arts in a romantic exuberance of forms. 
 It will make its own experiments in politics and 
 even in religion : resolved to march, though 
 it knows not whither. It prizes doubt above
 
 90 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 the creeds outworn, and will prefer Scepticism 
 to the ancient faith, and Nihilism to the ancient 
 regime. It will live ' according to nature,' 
 which always means living according to the 
 impulse which happens to be most in evidence 
 at the moment. It prefers to go naked rather 
 than to wear the decent habiliments of custom, 
 and the only vice it recognizes is ' respectability.' 
 
 It is usual, and I think right, to say that 
 this kind of freedom obtained its boldest and 
 most unrestrained expression in the French 
 Revolution. The Gospel of Jean Jacques 
 Rousseau was then fairly taken to heart. 
 This people would dissolve the old conventions, 
 and, if they could not do without any at all, 
 if they could not ' go back to nature ' without 
 ' going on all foui's,' they would at least submit 
 to no conventions except those which were 
 forged by themselves by universal consent, 
 and these should be as few and as light to 
 bear as possible. If the State must ' interfere ' 
 it shall not interfere much. 
 
 Negation could hardly go further than it 
 went in those days. ' Old garnitures and social
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 91 
 
 vestures drop off. being quite decayed, and are 
 trodden under the National dance. . . . The 
 Nation is for the present, figuratively speaking, 
 naked : it has no rule or vesture ; but is naked 
 — a Sanscullotic Nation.' ^ Tradition, secular 
 and sacred, was set aside ; history was repudi- 
 ated, for it was ' The Year One.' There was 
 social anarchy and religious scepticism : anarchy 
 not merely as revolt against the evils of the 
 government which had just perished, but as 
 a spirit of individualism which regards any 
 government as a restraint ; and atheism, not 
 merely in the sense of denying the deistic 
 deity of that time which was only an idol, 
 a God remote and without ears to hear or 
 hands to help, but in the far deeper and 
 more disastrous sense of secularizing the spirit 
 of man and reducing it into a thing with 
 senses, plus unlimited greed. 
 
 And yet there was more at work than nihilism 
 and atheism. Negation is never mere negation. 
 Men deny one thing because they believe 
 something else with which it is inconsistent. 
 
 ' Fr. Rev. iii. ii.
 
 92 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 Negation is the collision of two positives : it 
 is one segment of experience saying ' No ' to 
 another segment : it is often the faith of the 
 present generation at war with the faith of its 
 predecessor. In this case it was the faith of man 
 in himself set against the authorities, human 
 and divine, which had been ruling him without 
 consulting him. 
 
 It is because negation is the collision of two 
 positives, an experience divided against itself, 
 that no rest can be found in it. The situation 
 is intolerable. No house can stand if it be 
 divided against itself ; that of spirit least of all. 
 Experience has a varied content, and it often 
 entertains contradictions, but not willingly, if 
 they are awake and vocal. 
 
 Hence scepticism, whether religious, moral or 
 social, is always in unstable equilibrium. If the 
 old faith has become impossible a new one 
 must be found. At the very heart of the wild 
 anarchy of the French Revolution there was a 
 striving for some opinion that men might hold 
 by, for some way of life that might be worth 
 following, for some social order within which
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 93 
 
 they could find refuge. There was a hurried 
 obedience to the inner imperative which com- 
 pels the spirit that negates to escape from its 
 own achievement. 
 
 It is no marvel, therefore, that this people 
 should at first build its new social and religious 
 edifices with slack mortar : that their ' consti- 
 tutions would not march.' Is it not a rule of 
 old that when men put aside the sober raiment 
 of the ancient morals, they will clothe themselves 
 in the tinselled tags of caprice ? I have never 
 known a sceptic who had not his superstitions. 
 People who reject both Christianity and Science 
 adopt Christian-Science ; and if they do not 
 trust in G-od, it is as likely as not that they 
 will believe in ghosts. When the Israelites lost 
 sight of Moses they gathered themselves unto 
 Aaron ; and he took their offerings and ' with 
 a graving tool fashioned them unto a molten 
 calf; and they said, These be thy gods, 
 Israel.'^ And there was a day in the history 
 of the French Revolution ' when Procureur 
 Chauraette and Municipals and Departmentals 
 
 ' Ex. xxxii. 4.
 
 94 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 arrive, and with them the strangest freightage: 
 a new Religion. Demoiselle Candeille, of the 
 opera ; a woman fair to look on when well 
 rouged; she, borne on palanquin shoulder-high; 
 with red woollen nightcap ; in azure mantle ; 
 garlanded with oak ; holding in her hand the 
 Pike of the Jupiter-pe?<p^e, sails in ; heralded 
 by white young women girt in tricolor. This 
 is our new Divinity : Goddess of Reason, and 
 alone worthy of revering. Her henceforth we 
 adore.' ^ 
 
 This adoration of Reason went all over the 
 Republic, and we may well ask, with Carlyle, 
 what ' Reason herself thought of it all the 
 while ? ' What can reason think of it, except 
 that man ' is a born- worshipper,' if not of the 
 God of all the earth, then of some foolish 
 ' Mumbo- jumbo ' made with his own hands. It 
 was the beginning of religious reconstruction, 
 and, in truth, religion could hardly begin again 
 in a more pathetic way. 
 
 It is not very respectful to Napoleon the 
 Great to make him take his place at the side of 
 
 * Fr. Rev. in. iv. 
 
 I
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 95 
 
 Demoiselle Candeille. But he too represents the 
 first crude attempt at restoration ; and political 
 liberty was not less caricatured in his tyranny 
 than was religion in the worship of reason. 
 ' The whifF of grape-shot ' announced with suffi- 
 cient emphasis for even that mad time to com- 
 prehend that the rights of insurrection were 
 exhausted and that henceforth there must be 
 peace on any footing, and order at any cost. 
 The first foundations of the new world were 
 laid, and laid, as needs must be, on the most 
 rudimentary basis : namely, that of despotism. 
 For it seems to be a universal law that any 
 new principle, whether it be moral and concern 
 merely the life of the individual, or social and 
 concern the life of a nation, must first express 
 itself in an elementary form, and operate crudely 
 amongst the crudest energies. Thence it must 
 travel upwards, evolving its content as it goes, 
 and leavening, one by one, the elements of 
 life within which it works. The content of a 
 practical principle, like the meaning of a 
 scientific hypothesis, comes out only in the 
 process of its application. At first its signi-
 
 96 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 ficance is small, as it maintains itself with 
 difficulty amidst the old propensities. The most 
 momentous moral principle ever introduced into 
 this world of ours was likened, by Him who 
 announced it, to *a grain of mustard seed, 
 which a man took and cast into his garden.' ^ 
 But it gathers strength as it works amongst 
 the elements of the old life. It breaks old 
 habits, nay, by its new dedication of them it 
 inspires them with the breath of a nobler 
 meaning and transmutes them utterly : so that 
 ' He that eateth, eateth to the Lord : and he 
 that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not.' 
 ' For none of us liveth to himself, and no man 
 dieth to himself.'^ 
 
 This process is very slow, and its difficulty 
 is proportionate to the worth of the new prin- 
 ciple. There are no leaps in morals and 
 politics, any more than in mathematics. It is 
 as vain to try to superimpose an enlightened 
 social polity on a savage people as to expect 
 a beginner in mathematics to solve problems 
 in the Differential Calculus. Man, in his pro- 
 
 ' Luke xiii. 19. ^Romans xiv. 6, 7. 
 
 J
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 97 
 
 gress, must run up the whole scale, chromatic 
 notes and all, in learning moral and political 
 wisdom. Nothing can be omitted. When 
 history seems to have forgotten an aspect of 
 the good it turns back for it. The religious 
 enthusiasm and moral rigour of the age of 
 Cromwell forgot the arts, and for the sake of 
 the arts England had to rejoice for a time in 
 Charles the Second. It is the tvliole of human 
 nature which is to be saved, and the social 
 edifice in which it is ultimately to express 
 itself is to be a palace of many wings. 
 
 From this point of view even Demoiselle 
 Candeille ceases to be merely pitiful or 
 ridiculous. At the worst she stood for the 
 better cause ; for any poorest worship that is 
 free is better than superstition, which always 
 carries fear at the heart of it and abases the 
 worshipper : and even if Reason be not God, 
 Unreason is not amongst His attributes. And, as 
 to Napoleon, if he did introduce a more master- 
 ful tyranny which drained the forces of the 
 people still nearer the lees, he was, after all, a 
 tyrant of the people's choice, and they gave 
 
 G
 
 98 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 to liim the lives whicli he took. He exercised 
 his authority in their name ; and, as events 
 ultimately showed, it was the hand of freedom 
 which held the hilt of the sword. It was 
 freedom that the French people would enforce 
 on other nations, when they tyrannously de- 
 manded the death of tyrants. 
 
 Nor do I believe that, in either aspect of it, 
 their work has proved vain. The word which 
 has gone forth will not return empty. The 
 ideal of social liberty, though it flickered faint 
 for a time like a little candle in a high wind, 
 never went out ; and its light is destined yet 
 to broaden downwards so that all men shall 
 rejoice in it. Democracy was born at that 
 time, a Hercules amongst the snakes, and it is 
 devoting a growing strength to its more than 
 twelve labours. In like manner the Ideal of 
 all Ideals, namely, that of Keligion, which is 
 the dedication of the whole life to what 
 is deemed highest, and without which, as I 
 believe, no nation can live, shall yet be free, — 
 a religion which in every fibre of its credo 
 shall commend itself to the reason of man, and
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 99 
 
 satisfy his whole heart because it satisfies his 
 mind. 
 
 What we have to observe in these events, 
 then, is a new phenomenon : that of a new 
 principle setting out to master the world. 
 Man, now completely conscious of his right to 
 freedom, proceeds to make that freedom good, 
 to establish it amidst the extant powers of the 
 world, an equal, and more, * amongst their 
 mightiest energies,' For he has to subordinate 
 them to his spirit, and make the social, political, 
 and religious order the exponents of his freedom. 
 Hence we see old ways of life restored one by 
 one. Truths were discovered in the repudiated 
 creeds, institutions that were useful and ways 
 of life which were honourable and of good 
 report were found amongst the debris of the 
 old social and political world. These were 
 worked, little by little, into the new edifice. 
 But not in the old way. History did not turn 
 back quite along the old track. The French 
 Revolution did not stultify itself. The old 
 material was put to new uses, in obedience to 
 the plans of the new architectonic conception
 
 100 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 of IX Freedom wliicli was to find no limits any 
 more, except within itself. 
 
 But Freedom itself lias changed its meaning 
 in the meantime. It is no longer merely- 
 negative. It no longer sets the individual 
 conscience against the universal order of the 
 Church and the State. It is now divined that 
 the State itself may be free, and the means of 
 the freedom of its members. Men now regarded 
 it with a new reverence. History was prized 
 once more and the hoary experience of the 
 world. The ' Year One ' disappeared from the 
 French Calendar, and men began to count once 
 more from the opening of the Christian Era — 
 pending the time when they shall date the 
 dawn of man's hope still further back, even 
 ' when the morning stars sang together, and 
 all the sons of God shouted for joy.' They 
 discovered that wisdom had dwelt long in the 
 world, and that, up to the measure of their 
 capacity, it had been guiding from of old 
 the blind and stumbling footsteps of men. 
 Religion was brought back. The hard secular 
 spirit which had cast its dusky shadow over
 
 FREEDOM: THEN THE EAR 101 
 
 the world, and darkened the ways of mankind, 
 is being put to flight. The literature and the 
 philosophy of the New Age — for by no other 
 name can we call it — is instinct with the sense 
 of a divinity within the world. And there is 
 the promise that all history shall be deemed 
 sacred, and not merely some nineteen centuries 
 of it. Nature is also seen in a larger light, 
 and the life of man is freighted with a new 
 significance, even ' as they load a star with 
 light.' 
 
 Hegel and Goethe, Carlyle and Wordsworth — 
 the poetic imagination in them catching first the 
 rosy light of the new dawn and their philosophy 
 following and broadening the light into the 
 clearness and calm of the common day — these 
 poet-philosophers, I say, are unique amongst 
 their peers ; and they are unique precisely in 
 this- — that they teach the world as it never was 
 taught before, in any age, how sacred it all is 
 and how interfused with the light divine. And 
 shall I err much, think you, if I say that the 
 practical business upon which the world is now 
 engaged, whether in its commerce and its
 
 102 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 industries, or in its science and philosophy, or 
 in the battles of the sects and the war of the 
 politicians, is that of making real the ideals 
 of these its prophets, giving them an actual 
 footing and the right to rule amongst the com- 
 mon affairs of the common world ? It is a 
 great enterprise and meant to engage the best 
 might of men for a long time to come.
 
 IV. 
 
 FREEDOM: AFTER THAT THE FULL CORN. 
 
 The process which began with the Athens of Socrates and 
 cnhninated in the French Revolution : The conception 
 which underlies the process : The conception illustrated 
 in the interaction of the Citizen and the State : The 
 good state and citizen distinguished from the bad : 
 A ' trade ' and a ' profession ' ; the worker and his work : 
 In what sense modern society is a Moloch : Positive 
 freedom arrives when morality is socialized and society 
 is moralized: The Morality, Philosophy, Art and Religion 
 of the Modern Age are in concord : Their mission is only 
 to illuminate : Its inevitableness illustrated in Words- 
 worth ; but his spirit was prepared for it : Moral.
 
 IV. 
 
 FEEEDOM: AFTER THAT THE FULL CORN. 
 
 Human history will not fit very accurately into 
 any formula that the philosopher can devise ; 
 there are too many concurrent ages moving side 
 by side — not without collision. Nevertheless, 
 even without an excessive use of the imagin- 
 ation, we can see in the Athens of Socrates 
 the beginning of a process which gathered 
 strength for many centuries and culminated in 
 the French Revolution. It was the process 
 whereby man was learning the intrinsic great- 
 ness of his own nature as a spiritual being ; 
 and how it has the right, and must acquire 
 the power, of determining its own faith and 
 guiding its own behaviour. Tliis process 
 implied the gradual subjection to criticism of 
 all the institutions founded upon the might
 
 106 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 of the stronger, and, in so far as they rested 
 on that basis, their final overthrow. But, in- 
 asmuch as man must have an objective order 
 in which to live, these same institutions, secular 
 and sacred, were restored again, though not 
 upon the old basis. Henceforth they must 
 express man's own convictions, and be the 
 objective counterpart of his inner life. It is this 
 process of restoration which we have now to 
 consider, with a view to comprehending some- 
 thing of the conditions under which it can take 
 place. And, first of all, we must observe the 
 presupposition that underlies the process — the 
 idea that was operating within the stubborn 
 and yet plastic material of the practical life 
 of the age and gradually changing its whole 
 character. 
 
 That idea found its prophetic expression in the 
 imagination of the great poets and the reflective 
 thought of the philosophers who appeared at 
 the dawn of the New Epoch. It is, that Spirit 
 is more and higher than any material or natural 
 force, and has superior rights ; and further, 
 that the natural world is itself the symbol or
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 107 
 
 phenomenal manifestation of Spirit. When 
 man's mind gets entry into the arcana of 
 nature, and finds what is working at its 
 heart, it will see something akin to itself there. 
 His true thoughts will express its meaning ; 
 its reality manifests itself in his valid ideas. 
 There is here neither chasm nor rift ; but easy 
 and constant intercourse. Nature is not a crass, 
 material lump, 'or brass clock-work.' A mechani- 
 cal explanation of it does not suffice ; it is too 
 obviously and intimately related to Spirit. Nay, 
 it is itself spiritual, shot through and through 
 with the rays of reason, and freighted with 
 significance. As to the Social order — the State 
 and its secular institutions and the Church with 
 its rites and dogmas — it is not a restraint upon 
 the liberty of Spirit, through which it must 
 break in order to be free. Nor are passive 
 and unquestionable obedience to them, on the 
 one hand, or an antagonism that shall annul 
 them, on the other, the only alternatives. The 
 victory of Spirit over them can be much more 
 complete. It may convert them. ' The Demi- 
 God who had destroyed ' the beautiful world,
 
 108 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 can build it again within, 'with greater majesty.' 
 The Spirit of man may find itself in the social 
 order, and much more fully than in the order 
 of nature. The law within and the law with- 
 out may coincide, Man may be obedient and 
 yet free, and the more obedient because he is 
 free. The social authority may be still stead- 
 fast, and the more steadfast and imperative 
 because it is rooted in the heart of its subjects. 
 
 This, I believe, is clearly the essential message 
 of the prophets of the Modern Age ; and the 
 carrying out of this message in practice is the 
 work on which it is engaged. We are gradually 
 reconciling ourselves to the conditions under 
 which we necessarily must live without com- 
 promising either their authority or our own 
 freedom ; for we are discovering that their 
 authority is rational and benevolent, and that 
 submission to it is the pursuit of our own 
 best good. We are re-instituting that authority, 
 converting the law without into a law within ; 
 and thereby realizing the completest liberty. 
 
 Will you permit me to turn aside for a 
 moment in order to illustrate and bring this
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 109 
 
 truth more intimately home to our minds ? We 
 find that the modern State protects life and 
 property, constrains equal justice between man 
 and man, restrains the violence of the strong, 
 fosters the weak by educating the young and 
 providing for the needs of the aged poor. It 
 does these things by authoritative enactments, 
 and its decrees carry throughout the whole land 
 much more thoroughly than in any rudimentary 
 State. Now, are these regulations irksome ? 
 * Certainly not,' we reply, ' not to the good 
 citizen.' On the contrary they are what he 
 himself desires, and up to the measure of his 
 influence, he has helped to enact them. The 
 taxation they imply is no doubt a burden, if 
 it be regarded by itself; but the intelligent 
 citizen does not regard taxation by itself, but 
 in relation to the good it brings, which is the 
 good of the whole State and comprises his own. 
 It is thus not only possible, but it is a fact, that 
 the will of the State and the will of the citizens 
 can be, not two wills but one. And when such 
 is the case liberty and law are reconciled. We 
 do not see two powers confronting and confining
 
 no IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 each other ; but one ethical spirit expressing 
 itself at once in two directions, manifesting 
 itself both in the free will of the citizen and 
 in the authoritative imperatives of the State. 
 And each sustains the other, as two wills always 
 do when they are in agreement. The State 
 finds its enactments ratified by the consent of 
 the citizens, and the citizens find their desires 
 realized in the legislation of the State. 
 
 In order to find the conditions which make 
 this possible, let us consider for a moment an 
 opposite instance. Let us observe, not the 
 ideal State with ideal citizens, but an imperfect 
 State with imperfect citizens. Nor need we 
 travel far for our examples. When either the 
 State or the citizen (or both, as is always the 
 case) is morally crude and undeveloped there 
 are constant collisions. The regulations of the 
 State are irksome to the one, and the liberty 
 of the citizens constitutes a danger to the other. 
 The criminal, to the measure of his capacity, is 
 an enemy of the social order and would destroy 
 it ; the autocratic State is an enemy to the 
 freedom of its members and would repress it. 
 
 I 
 
 <
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 111 
 
 Even when the citizen is not a criminal and 
 the State is not a tyranny we have collision : 
 whenever, in fact, the will of the individual is 
 not socialized, or that of the State is not 
 moralized ; whenever, in other words, the citizen 
 does not care much or wisely for the State, or 
 the State for its citizens. In such circumstances, 
 the sense of responsibility is weak on both sides; 
 and each endeavours to use the other as means, 
 instead of respecting it as itself an end. The 
 citizen makes as much out of the State as he 
 can, and the State consults the citizen no more 
 than it can avoid. It will hoodwink him when 
 it cannot flout his opinions, and enact his will 
 only when it can delay no longer. 
 
 How far this description answers to any State 
 that you know I cannot say. But this I can 
 say : — that so far as such a condition prevails 
 the State is weak and unstable. A political 
 society which cares for only some of its members, 
 while the others are denied the rio-hts and 
 obligations of citizenship, and are as aliens and 
 foster-children on its hearth ; or a State which 
 hearkens only to the voice of a ' class ' and is
 
 112 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 deaf to wider interests ; or a State which protects 
 and furthers only S07ne of the conditions of a 
 developed manhood while it neglects or re- 
 pudiates others, can command only a limited 
 loyalty. It is the scene of dissension, and the 
 victim of factions, and it is too weak to move 
 steadily towards ends whose worth is universal. 
 On the other hand, there is no more certain 
 symbol of a limited and crude personality than 
 heedlessness of the common good — of which the 
 political State, with its institutions, is the 
 representative. The aTroAt?, the man who does 
 not carry his city within his heart, is a spiritual 
 starveling. The measure of manhood is the 
 fulness and generosity of its interests. The 
 diviner the man the wider the world for which 
 he lives and dies. It does not matter what 
 a man does or has, if the current of his life 
 sets inwards he is but a greedy animal with 
 an unusually voracious appetite. Of Spiritual 
 dignity he has none. If he cares for the State 
 only as means of securing his private ends, 
 and uses its waters to grind his own corn, or 
 that of the class with whose interests he is 
 
 t^tmrn
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 113 
 
 immediately bound, he has but aggrandised his 
 selfishness, and he is as great an enemy to his 
 people as he is to himself. 
 
 The conclusion, then, to which we are driven 
 by the contemplation both of the ideal and of 
 the imperfect State and citizen is that the 
 matter with which we are dealing is ethical m 
 character. On the one hand, all moral questions 
 for the individual, that is, all questions which 
 are first in magnitude, are social questions. The 
 bad man cannot help being a public calamity, 
 and the good man, according to his power, 
 cannot help being the stay and strength of his 
 people. Even though he often errs for lack of 
 insight, if the well-being of his people pulsates 
 in his veins there is in him what will correct 
 his errors. And it is wonderful how rarely 
 and how little men err if their impulses are 
 generous and their aims disinterested. On the 
 other hand, questions of statesmanship are 
 moral questions, even though morality is the 
 one thing that no State can enforce.^ 
 
 * For morality must be free, and its motives are the agent's 
 own ; and all that a political State can attempt to secure ai'e 
 
 H
 
 114 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 ■/ Tlie supreme problem of the State, it may be 
 well to make clear, is not merely nor primarily 
 to secure a particular form of government ; but 
 to learn what it ought to strive after under 
 any form of government. We are inclined to 
 assume that all will be well with the State 
 provided its government be democratic ; and 
 we consider the democratic State to be that 
 in which all its adult citizens have a share in 
 ruling. But a State may be democratic in 
 this sense, and still be corrupt and degenerate. 
 It may be, what Plato conceived it, a' slave 
 to the clamour of passion and ignorance, and 
 a minister to the greed of its constituents — 
 a thing which no man can revere and from 
 which every one seeks private gain. The 
 question turns, once more, upon the character 
 of its motives. Any government is ggod^whose 
 purpose is to serve the permanent interests_of 
 the goA^erned; and which seeks to attain this 
 end by evolving the character of its citizens, 
 
 the means and outer conditions. It must let the moral life 
 alone, " this year also, till it shall dig about it, and dung it : 
 and if it bear fruit, well ; and, if not, then after that shall it 
 be cut down." — Luke xiii. 8, 9.
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 115 
 
 in which alone is its true strength, A demo- 
 cracy is the best form only because the 
 political wisdom of the many is capable of 
 being much greater than the wisdom of one, as 
 the political folly of the many brings with it 
 more irretrievable disaster than the folly of one. 
 A democracy is capable of being either the 
 worst, or the best kind of rule. It is the best 
 when it is what Plato desired the State to be — 
 an institution for educating its citizens in all 
 the virtues. For the State ivas an educational 
 establishment for Plato, and all questions of 
 statesmanship were moi^al questions. 
 
 Taking up both sides once more, we arrive at 
 the conclusion that the individual finds his tr ue 
 end in the State, and the State in the individual. 
 Every personal duty is a social obligation, and 
 every just and wise political enactment has 
 the evolution of the qualities of personality as 
 its end. No State ever legislated well if it 
 weakened the individuality or limited the enter- 
 prise of its copsmuents — a truth which jSome 
 forms of modern Socialism have not laid to lifeart. 
 
 Th^iT is one more step still to be tal^n in 
 
 
 to loaA <M- ^^<^ <^^^ ev.'>l^.n^ ^/ ,^r 
 
 i^-"-
 
 116 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 the analysis of the conditions of a good State. 
 The recognition of mutual obligation is not 
 adequate, and the obligation itself is not com- 
 pletely binding until it is known to be self- 
 imposed ; and it is genuinely self-imposed only 
 when the agent recognizes it as his oivn good . 
 6-^,^ can have no excuse for revolting against a 
 line of action freely determined on by myself, 
 and I can have no appeal against my own 
 conscience. Nor can I ever justify myself for 
 not seeking my own good. The obligation is 
 both absolute and free. 
 
 But its absoluteness comes from its bene- 
 ficence. Duty, the ' Stern daughter of the 
 Voice of God,' is * a light to guide ' as well as 
 ' a rod to check the erring, and reprove.' 
 
 ' Stern Lawgiver ! yet thou dost wear 
 The Godhead's most benignant grace ; 
 Nor know we anything so fair 
 As is the smile upon thy face : 
 Flowers laugh before thee on their beds 
 And fragrance in thy footing treads ; 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong : 
 And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh 
 and strong.'^ 
 
 1 Wordsworth's 'Ode to Duty.'
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 117 
 
 Under the inspiration of duty thus conceived 
 the social relations which knit men to one 
 another within the State not only cease to be 
 irksome bonds, but acquire priceless worth. His 
 duties are the very best things a man has, and 
 he cannot have too many of them ; for what 
 he cannot do is not his duty. He acquires 
 value from his social context, like a musical 
 phrase in a beautiful setting, or ' apples of gold 
 in pictures of silver.' It is in his social con- 
 text that he can exercise his spiritual functions, 
 which, as Aristotle has shown, is * happiness.' 
 What is it, for instance, except his obligations 
 to his fellowmen, ' his station and its duties,' 
 which fills with interest and worth the life of 
 the physician, or judge, or legislator, or teacher, 
 or the maker and distributor of material goods ? 
 So far from confining his freedom, or inhibiting 
 his life, they are its substance and steadfast 
 joy. Deprive him of these, let him stand out 
 of the social ranks refused, and he presents 
 one of the most pitiful of spectacles we are 
 ever compelled to witness — a willing worker 
 holding out empty hands. To a man to live
 
 118 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 is his cause. The heaviest burden that ever a 
 man has tried to bear is a life deprived of 
 its motive. When Othello cries out that 'His 
 occupation 's gone,' we seem to hear the strings 
 of his heart snap. It has seemed to me, in its 
 context, almost the most pathetic line that 
 Shakespeare has written. 
 
 But I am reminded of the difference between 
 
 a ' profession ' and a ' trade ' ; a ' trade ' is said 
 
 to be that which a man follows in order to 
 
 live^i^ and a ' profession ' is that to follow 
 
 /-which a man lives. I acknowledge, not wdth- 
 
 X out sorrow, that there are stations in life and 
 
 rounds of daily duty whose spiritual value for 
 
 /^ those who are engaged in them is very low ; 
 
 and, with the growth of modern invention and 
 
 ' <:^'^'^ the increasing complexity of social arrange- 
 
 ? . -T-* ments, their number has vastly increased. The 
 
 ^ symmetry of character of the citizen of ancient 
 
 Athens, which gave him an opportunity of 
 
 exercising all his powers in turn, seems to be 
 
 impossible in a modern State where duties are 
 
 specialized. Nor is one-sided development the 
 
 worst evil which we have to deplore. For men
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 119 
 
 are being mechauized by the labour that should 
 raise them ; and society is often a parent which 
 passes its children through the fire, a sacrifice 
 to Moloch. 
 
 This is a matter which modern society has 
 yet to consider, on its own account not less 
 than on account of its victims. So far, we 
 have not recognized our responsibility in an 
 adequate way, nor seriously sought the solution 
 of a problem which is as vital as it is difficult. 
 The more enlightened modern States are striving 
 to improve the conditions of labour ; but, so far, 
 they have not seen their way clear to prohibit 
 much of the labour which dehumanizes men. 
 It is recognized, in a theoretic and academic 
 way, that, even from the point of view of 
 political economy, which is one of the most iUt^^ U -no 
 inadequate points of view for considering wan^'^^^^'^'^'^ ^^' 
 the waste of human qualities is the greatest of 
 all waste. But even those whose gain would 
 be most immediate if they could devise means 
 by which all their employees would be reliable, 
 sober, punctual, sensitive and faithful to their 
 employers' interests, have either despaired of
 
 120 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 bringing this about, or, in many cases, have 
 never seriously attempted to do so. It is diffi- 
 cult to say whether the men or the masters 
 are most improvident in this respect. But 
 the result is evident : it is the impoverishment 
 of the general life of the State. Instead of 
 economising the greatest of all j^roductive forces, 
 namely human qualities, they are being used 
 up. Men are being scrapped like old iron. 
 
 I cannot doubt that labou r is meant ^^^jjg 
 dignify the labourer, He should arise from his 
 daily work a better man. The energies which 
 he sets free upon his handicraft are capable, 
 as every honest workman knows, of coming 
 back to him enriched ; bringing with them more 
 skill, the consciousness of a duty well done, and 
 the satisfaction which the artist knows as his 
 best reward. Provided this takes place, the 
 diflference between one occupation and another 
 is of quite secondary importance. ' Two men I 
 honour,' says Carlyle, ' and no third. First, 
 the toil worn Craftsman that with earth -made 
 Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and 
 makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hard
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 121 
 
 Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding 
 lies a cunning Virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of 
 the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too, is 
 the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, 
 with its rude intelligence ; for it is the face 
 of a Man living manlike. 0, but the more 
 venerable for thy rudeness, and even because 
 we must pity as well as love thee ! Hardly- 
 entreated Brother ! For us was thy back so 
 bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers 
 so deformed : thou wert our Conscript, on whom 
 the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so 
 marred. For in thee too lay a god-created 
 Form, but it was not to be unfolded ; encrusted 
 must it stand with the thick adhesions and 
 defacements of Labour : and thy body, like 
 thy soul, was not to know freedom. Yet toil 
 on, toil on : thou art in thy duty, be out of 
 it who may ; thou toilest for the altogether 
 indispensable, for daily bread. 
 
 'A second man I honour, and still more highly : 
 Him who is seen toiling for the spiritually in- 
 dispensable ; not daily bread, but the bread 
 of Life. Is not he too in his duty ; endeavour-
 
 122 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 ing towards inward Harmony ; revealing this, 
 by act or by word, through all his outward 
 endeavours, be they high or low ? Highest of 
 all, when his outward and his inward endeavours 
 are one : when we can name him Artist ; not 
 earthly Craftsman only, but inspired Thinker, 
 who with heaven-made Implement conquers 
 Heaven for us ! If the poor and humble toil 
 that we have Food, must not the high and 
 glorious toil for him in return, that he have 
 Light, have Guidance, Freedom, Immortality ? 
 These two in all their degrees I honour : all 
 else is chaff and dust, which let the wind 
 blow whither it listeth. Unspeakably touching 
 is it, however, when I find both dignities united ; 
 and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest 
 of man's wants, is also toiling inwardly for the 
 highest. Sublimer in this world know I nothing 
 than a Peasant Saint, could such now anywhere 
 be met with. Such a one will take thee back 
 to Nazareth itself; thou wilt see the splendour 
 of Heaven spring forth from the humblest depths 
 of Earth, "like a light shining in great darkness. " ' ^ 
 
 ^ Sartor Iiesartus, Bk. iii. (Helotage). 
 
 I
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 123 
 
 In a society where such conditions rule the 
 State and the individual will verily serve and 
 strengthen each other. The citizen has but to 
 stand in his station and perform its duties in 
 order to fulfil the demands of citizenship. He 
 is like an organ to the organism, best where he 
 is — at his own work. There were then neither 
 opportunity nor need for that vagrant knight- 
 errantry which sends a man roaming for the 
 opportunities of a good life, and we would 
 witness less of that moral condescension and 
 meddlesomeness which is so well intentioned 
 and brings so poor a harvest. He would find 
 right things to do where his skill is greatest, 
 namely, in his own vocation, and perform therein 
 the unique service which society demands of him. 
 Doing that, none would deserve better of the 
 State, for there is a valid sense, none more ulti- 
 mate, in which all 'service ranks the same.' 
 There is no humblest task which a high 
 purpose may not ennoble ; and no remotest 
 post on the confines of a vast empire where 
 the loyal citizen, like the lonely soldier on the 
 velt, may not know that he is the representative
 
 124 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 of its majesty. And the State, on its part, if 
 it is itself enlightened and worthy of such a 
 citizen, will put forth all its force in case of 
 need, in order to protect him and sustain him 
 in his rights ; for he is there on its account. 
 
 Thus does tog._ii"S.a(iQni show itself to be 
 no merely negative thing. It is emancipation, 
 non-interference, exclusion, yjde])enden(je jor^tj^^ 
 individu^^ and great, indeed, is the price which 
 civilization has paid to secure these for him. 
 But it is much more. It is life ivithin the 
 State ; it is the life of tlie State within its 
 members, for his duties to himself are duties 
 to the State. A duty well done radiates far : 
 ' shining like a good deed in a naughty world,' 
 and the world takes note of it. The man who 
 stands firm within his duty, stands not merely 
 for himself but for his family, and not merely for 
 his family but for his neighbours, not merely for 
 his neighbours but for his State ; nay, he stands 
 for what is universally right because it is in- 
 trinsically right. ' Inasmuch as ye have done 
 it unto one of the least of these my brethren, 
 ye have done it unto me.' He has served the
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 125 
 
 universal order, and the universal order is at 
 his back to sustain him. 
 
 You have noted, I do not doubt, a certain 
 consciousness of invincibility characterize a man 
 who considers that he has done the risfht. It 
 is one of the unique features of the moral con- 
 sciousness, and worth considering as we pass. 
 If his neighbours are against him, and his times 
 condemn him, and he stands alone unsustained by 
 that human sympathy which is like the sap of 
 life, on what secret reservoir of strength does he 
 draw ? Having appealed in vain to the mind 
 of his times, what remains to him ? His answer 
 is prompt and decisive. He appeals to the 
 hetter mind of the times to come. His ultimate 
 tribunal is 'the nature of things.' For duty, 
 being an absolute obligation, implies that an 
 unerring authority has imposed it. It is the 
 will of the Absolute for philosophy, and of God 
 for religion : and it must prevail. ' If God be 
 
 for us, who can be against us ? ' < 
 
 . . . . Lov ^ 
 
 Herein is the ultimate achievement of the t^ci>vsc€n<) 
 
 Spirit of Freedom. It cannot demand more. c)w,tt^ — 
 
 Duty being the conscious accord and complicity
 
 126 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 of the individual's will with the whole scheme 
 of things, ' Who is he that condemneth ? ' What 
 is there which can obstruct or hinder? Not 
 the State, except when it is the enemy of its 
 own welfare, nor humanity, except when it has 
 lost its way. Spirit has come to its own by 
 coming to itself, and the world which was 
 alien and unfriendly has come over to the good 
 man's side and is his partner in his spiritual 
 enterprise. 
 
 Now, this, in its essence, is what the prophets 
 of the Modern Age have been teaching 'in divers 
 manners,' rending the veil between Nature and 
 Spirit, so that the light that dwells 'between 
 the cherubims ' shall shine forth to the uttermost 
 parts of the earth. For morality and philosophy 
 it is a gradual process and toilsome achievement : 
 because these are essentially a search and pur- 
 suit. They never count that ' they have already 
 attained, either were already perfect ; but they 
 follow after, if that they may apprehend.' 
 For art and religion it is not search but 
 possession : it is immediate apprehension, the 
 consciousness even now of the presence in nature
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 127 
 
 and in human history of the object of their 
 desire — a sense sublime and a disturbing joy. 
 For all of them alike it is such a re-translation 
 and transformation of the natural and secular, 
 as to saturate them with spiritual significance. 
 
 Indeed, this is the peculiar office of all the 
 four — of Morality, Philosophy, Art, and Religion, 
 namely, to reveal. They elicit the music that 
 is already there, like the wind amongst the 
 pines. Morality does not make a man his 
 brother's keeper : it reveals the brotherhood 
 which had been ignored. Philosophy does not 
 devise. It discovers. The presupposition which 
 underlies all its efforts is that the truth is 
 thei'e, if it could only get at it, embedded in 
 the very nature of things. Art is not artifice. 
 It holds the mirror up to nature, and the 
 beauty of nature passes into its face. Religion 
 does not invent its God, it finds Him : and, at 
 its best, it finds Him everywhere. The structure 
 of things is spiritual. 
 
 I daresay you have stood of a morning on 
 one of the heights of your Blue Mountains and 
 watched the risinsj sun warm into wondrous
 
 128 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 motion the mists that wrapped the world at 
 your feet, in its unsubstantial mantle. Now 
 here, now there, the veil is lifted for a moment 
 and you catch a glimpse of a valley, deep 
 below, lying in peaceful slumber. And ere 
 long the whole landscape lies before you bathed 
 in sunshine, — every rock and tree and rivulet 
 distinct in each line and curve, and vocal with 
 peace and its own particular beauty. The sun 
 has created nothing : it has only brought light 
 and warmth. It has set free the loveliness 
 which was present all the time, called forth 
 the curves and colours, and intensified the 
 splendour of the scene. So does the light of 
 religion illumine this world of ours, lifting the 
 veil of secularity from its face, and raising the 
 common duties of the common life into a 
 higher value. Set in the large context of what 
 is eternal, it becomes more clear to us that 
 some things are worth the doing and others 
 are better left undone : the good stands forth 
 more distinct, and evil casts a darker shadow. 
 Nothing has changed, except that the light has 
 come. Religion prescribes no new duties ; it 
 
 i^^.^^
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 129 
 
 has no province of its own, separate from the 
 rest of life. But it gives a new significance to 
 duty, and a new intensity to our aims. Our 
 acts are seen to have vast consequences : they 
 reverberate elsewhere, flinging their echoes 
 beyond the walls of time. 
 
 It is a similar illumination which comes from 
 Art and Philosophy. Art has no special sphere 
 within which it may be confined, any more than 
 Religion ; and Philosophy has not a peculiar 
 province of its own outside the sciences and 
 the ordinary reflexions of men. Art seeks 
 beauty _§nd Philosophy seejks tru^th everywhere. 
 The ' earth is theirs, and all the fulness there- 
 of. ' Art, Morality, Philosophy and Religion 
 are nothing but points of view, spectacular 
 heights from which Spirit .maj^survey existence; 
 but a point of view is a determining element 
 in every landscape, natural or spiritual. They 
 are protests against disorder, foes of discrepancy, 
 witnesses on behalf of ideals, bringers of 
 architectonic moods, by which facts are sub- 
 ordinated to some dominant vision, or passion, 
 or principle and transubstantiated in the process. 
 
 ./■
 
 130 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 for they are interfused with a worth which 
 otherwise they cannot have. 
 
 It is one of the characteristics of the Modern 
 Age, that its Morality, Philosophy, Art and 
 Religion are illustrating the same principle. 
 Their methods, as needs must be, are quite 
 different, and each moves independently in 
 obedience to its own law, none undertaking 
 the tasks of the others. But if their voices 
 are distinct they make the richer harmony, 
 and their concord is full of the happiest 
 auguries for our age. There have been times, 
 even in our own history, when their utterances 
 were at variance, — when Philosophy was at 
 war with Art, Art with Morality, and Religion 
 with all the three. Even yet Religion is a 
 somewhat reluctant partner, following rather 
 than taking the lead. The cause of their dis- 
 crepancy was, no doubt, that not one of them 
 was near enough to the heart of reality to 
 feel the throb of its single life. They mistook 
 their mission, and did not understand them- 
 selves. But in this modern age the grasp of 
 the meaning of life is so much more close, as
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 131 
 
 regards the spiritual principle of it, that these 
 different witnesses support each other's testi- 
 mony. Our greatest modern poets and philo- 
 sophers illumine one another. Modern poetry 
 has proved itself, in a peculiar degree, to be 
 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, 
 the impassioned expression which is in the 
 countenance of all science.' The imagination is 
 not at war with reason, nor beauty with truth. 
 The minor poet may, indeed, be still ' the idle 
 singer of an empty day,' and there are philo- 
 sophers yet who spin their abstractions from 
 their own substance, detached from the living 
 forces of their times ; nor is it every theologian 
 who has swept from his wings the clinging 
 webs of antiquated traditions. But the greater 
 poets and philosophers hide in no such reti^ {-^^i -^l-^ "^"^-^ 
 ment, and are engaged upon no sjacK idly ^^^ y^ -y^ 
 private tasks. They have little freedom, or, at ' 
 least, little of the freedom of caprice. They 
 express the deep impulse of their epoch yearn- 
 ing for a more harmonious life, and they obey 
 necessities which choose and are not chosen, or 
 rather, which are chosen because they choose.
 
 132 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 When a poet is at his best there is a certain 
 inevitableness in his work. He is driven by 
 his moods as by a strong tempest. He is not 
 always the master of his own conceptions. He 
 says things greater than he knows ; and often 
 enough it is only the slowly maturing experi- 
 ence of later times which can bring out and 
 make good his meaning. 
 
 This was, I believe, the special, almost the 
 unique character of Wordsworth at his best. 
 When he is most himself, he is least merely 
 himself. There is in him a certain ' massive 
 passivity.' The beauty of the world played 
 upon his soul, as upon an organ, and he 
 seems to give forth a music not his own. 
 He appears only to throw open the windows 
 of his soul, and the beauty of sky and earth 
 and the grave splendour of the life of man 
 strike in. He contributes nothing : there is 
 no need. He is not a master but a pupil, 
 listening with a heart attuned to the majestic 
 music. 
 
 ' Come forth unto the light of things, 
 Let Nature be your teacher.'
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 133 
 
 ' She has a world of ready wealth, 
 Our minds and hearts to bless — 
 Spontaneous wisdom, breathed by health, 
 Truth breathed by cheerfulness.' 
 
 Poets have used Nature for many purposes ; 
 sweeping their hands over her strings they have 
 elicited what music they pleased. It was the 
 distinction of Wordsworth not to use nature 
 at all. He was so trustfully placid, and lay 
 so close to her bosom, that his thoughts rose 
 and fell with her breathing. 'He had only 
 to be quiet and attend.'^ '^' 
 
 ' The Spirit of Nature was upon me there ; 
 The Soul of Beauty and Enduring Life 
 Vouchsafed her inspiration, and diffused 
 Composure and ennobling Harmony.' 
 
 He had only to gaze upon a lovely scene, 
 
 but of itself 
 
 'It became 
 Far lovelier; and his heart could not sustain 
 The beauty, still more beauteous.' 
 
 But he had to gaze with the poet's eye, 
 and the appearance of mere receptiveness was 
 as deceptive as is the seeming rest of perfect 
 
 ^See Wordsworth, by Walter Raleigh (Edward Arnold), 
 some of whose suggestions I have followed with gratitude and 
 pride.
 
 134 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 motion. Truths break upon the imagination 
 of the scientific man, as well as the poet, like 
 the brightness of a sudden glory, and we call 
 them intuitive. But they never come to the 
 empty mind ; for they are, in fact, the sudden 
 blossoming of much apparently futile reflexion, 
 like the flower of a plant which seemed all 
 dead, and was all naked, throughout the winter. 
 These intuitions come too, as a rule, to a mind 
 refreshed, with all its energies pent within 
 itself, ready to break out into a perfect activity 
 which fuses past experience into one living 
 mass, all aglow with feeling. Wordsworth 
 speaks of ' a wise passivity.' 
 
 * Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
 
 Which of themselves our Minds impress; 
 That we can feed this Mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness.' 
 
 But the passiveness and sensitiveness are those 
 of the mind prepared, like the photographer's 
 film Jm'^ the light. To the making of the 
 i^,^^^^. '-^wisdom which can be passive, there has gone a 
 long discipline of mind and heart — renunciation, 
 strong; re straint and hig^h r esolve. Browning 

 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 135 
 
 tells us how Pompilia ' could rise from law 
 to law,' 
 
 ' The old to the new, promoted at one cry- 
 to the new service, not 
 To longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found 
 Sublime in new impatience with the foe 
 
 How the fine ear felt fall the first low Word.' 
 
 ' Thou at first prompting of what I call God, 
 And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend, 
 Accept the obligation laid on thee, 
 Mother elect, to save the unborn child. '^ 
 
 But the fine ear, sensitive to the new 
 command, had been long trained in the school 
 of virtue. Pompilia had been ' true to touch 
 in the past, practised in the right, approved 
 in all docility to all instruction.' 
 
 Nor is there a greater fallacy than to think 
 that the Beauty of the world comes at any 
 time and to any kind of soul. Beauty is 
 like truth, or moral worth, it comes not 
 without much seeking. The soul that is steeped 
 in sense, or disturbed with low ambitions for 
 things that pass, never really possesses the 
 loveliness of cloud, or sea, or landscape ; and 
 
 ^ The Ring and the Book : The Pope.
 
 136 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 man may even render himself incapable of re- 
 sponding to it. 
 
 ' In vain through every changeful year 
 Does Nature lead him as before; 
 
 A primrose by a river's brim 
 
 A yellow primrose was to him 
 And it was nothing more.' ^ 
 
 We find Wordsworth himself at times es- 
 tranged from Nature's loveliness. 
 
 ' The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; 
 Little we see in Nature that is ours. 
 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
 
 The sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
 And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; 
 
 For this, for everything, we are out of tune : 
 
 It moves us not.' 
 
 If this quiet passivity, this peace and purity 
 of spirit were intermittent and all too rare even 
 to the poet, amidst the speaking silence of the 
 hills of Cumberland, and in his unhurried age, 
 what shall we say of ourselves, in this age ? 
 
 I find you here, a young nation, with powers 
 not yet defined, and possibilities not yet circum- 
 scribed. The virgin peace of a vast continent 
 
 ^ Peter Bell.
 
 FREEDOM: THE FULL CORN 137 
 
 wraps you all about ; and one wonders if to its 
 
 solemn quietude there responds a complementary 
 
 tranquillity in your own souls, and if deep answers 
 
 unto deep. Your city sparkles like a gem under 
 
 your clear skies— with all its defects a fair thing 
 
 in the midst of loveliness. May I ask without 
 
 presumption whether at times you pause, so that 
 
 its beauty may pass into the soul and saturate 
 
 it with joy? I do not judge you, for I do 
 
 not know. But one thing I do know, that 
 
 no man and no nation was ever truly great 
 
 which did not commune with the quiet of the 
 
 world — sometimes by means of reflective con- ^^ 
 
 templation, as in the East ; sometimes by^.siegns^e.^erv^^'^ie^s ' 
 
 of Art, as in Greece and Mediae^r^Tltaly ; more 
 
 frequently by means of "feligidu. Israel's greatest 
 
 statesman was called forth from the land of 
 
 Midian, where he tended sheep. The most 
 
 picturesque figure amongst its prophets was 
 
 a dweller of the mountains of Gilead, and 
 
 lodged in a cave at Horeb, the mount of 
 
 God. These men mustered their powers amidst 
 
 the silences. Cromwell, who rode the wildest 
 
 storm which ever broke over your hard-tried
 
 138 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 ' Home ' — that other gem amongst the seas, 
 ' the little England with the mighty heart ' — 
 Cromwell had his times of quiet, his 'lown 
 place,' his sure refuge. And so had his un- 
 rivalled Ironsides. And, most assuredly, it 
 cannot be well with you here, or with us 
 at home, who are heirs to the still unexhausted 
 inheritance of the stern virtues of the Puritan 
 Age, if we lose utterly this quietness of spirit, 
 this solemn delight in deep communion with 
 the might and majesty of the world, and of 
 the mind of man. Either through religion, 
 or through Art and the wisest literature, or, 
 better still, throug;ii all of t hem, we shall and 
 must listen to the murmuF of their deeper 
 meaning — other>vise we can not prosper.
 
 THE IDEALISM OF WORDSWOETH AND 
 BROWNING. 
 
 What we ordinarily expect from the poets and philoso- 
 phers, and the consequences for them and for ourselves : 
 Their message to the present age : Wordsworth denied 
 'a system and ordered philosophy ' : Stupid notions about 
 philosophic systems and exaggeration of the difference 
 between poetry and philosophy : Men who are not 
 judges of either : The prose view of the world not 
 necessarily true ; Earnestness and thoroughness of 
 Wordsworth's Idealism : Wordsworth and Browning 
 contrasted : Browning's Agnosticism as regards the in- 
 tellect, and his Idealism of Love.
 
 V. 
 
 THE IDEALISM OF WORDSWORTH AND 
 BROWNING. 
 
 I VENTURED, in my last lecture, to augur well 
 of the present age from the concord of its 
 aesthetic, intellectual and ethical ideals. I ven- 
 tured also to set it down as a primary condition 
 of its prosperity that it should hold some one 
 at least of these ideals in high regard, as the 
 most precious element of its life, to be cared for 
 and fostered beyond every other thing. 
 
 But can this faith in the practical efficacy of 
 ideals be maintained ? Do the imaginations of 
 the poet and the theoretic constructions of the 
 philosopher verily mean much in a people's 
 life? Of the investigations of the man of 
 science, we have no doubt. These issue in dis- 
 coveries, and the discoveries in inventions, whose
 
 142 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 usefulness for man, as means for mastering the 
 material world, is palpable and greater than 
 can be measured. But we hardly expect such 
 a service from the exponents of ideals. They 
 see visions and dream dreams and have their 
 own great qualities, none nobler or more divine ; 
 but, amongst these qualities, we do not look 
 for hard and unadorned utilities. The Idealists 
 are not of this world, nor do they help us directly 
 in the conquest of it. It is enough if they 
 can allure mankind at times to forget the pres- 
 sure of its woes. We are content if the poet 
 charms the vacant hour, or the philosopher 
 stimulates the dulled intelligence to some tran- 
 sient sense of the mystery of being. We should 
 not dream of making the poet our guide along 
 the muddy ways of life, or of converting our 
 philosophers into kings. 
 
 The consequences of this attitude are natural 
 and inevitable enough. We turn aside from 
 the poets when we are engaged upon the real 
 business of life, and make them companions, at 
 the best, of only our lighter hours. And this 
 means that we do not really believe their
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 143 
 
 message, and have no use for it. They would 
 feed us on ambrosia and manna : what we want 
 is bread and butter. 
 
 Carlyle tells us that ' The old Arab tribes 
 would gather in liveliest gaudeamus, and sing, 
 and kindle bonfires, and wreathe crowns of 
 honour, and solemnly thank the gods that, in 
 their Tribe too, a Poet had shown himself. As 
 indeed they well might ; for what usefuler, I 
 say not nobler and heavenlier thing could the 
 gods, doing their very kindest, send to any 
 Tribe or Nation, in any time or circumstances ? ' 
 We behave otherwise. 'We English find a poet, 
 as brave a man as has been made for a hundred 
 years or so anywhere under the Sun ; and do 
 we kindle bonfires, or thank the gods ? Not 
 at all. We, taking due counsel of it, set the 
 man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of Dum- 
 fries, and pique ourselves on our " patronage of 
 genius." ' ^ We keep Wordsworth and Browning 
 waiting in our forecourts, like Johnson upon 
 Chesterfield, for fifty years — not merely for re- 
 cognition, but for the wages of ordinary honest 
 
 ^ Past and Present,
 
 144 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 hand-labour. We tarry so long, bringing patron- 
 age, that we set Carlyle, the prophet we needed 
 most of all, thinking of a shovel and pickaxe 
 in the American backwoods, all but breaking 
 the proud heart : ' Thou art not fit for that 
 either, my good fellow.' And we are so con- 
 sistent in our conduct, so persevering in our 
 neglect, that we are compelled to seek its 
 meaning. 
 
 What can it mean, except that we deem such 
 men to stand outside our lives, aloof from our 
 real interests ? Men do not ignore what they 
 can use, nor are they usually slow to acknow- 
 ledge the benefits which they recognize. But 
 the votary of the ideal, from of old, is not 
 recognized. ' He hath no form nor comeliness ; 
 and when we shall see him, there is no beauty 
 that we should desire him.' Either his message 
 lacks truth, or its import is lost upon us. 
 Either he is not worthy of that genuine homage 
 which is obedience from his fellow-men, or their 
 standard of worth is wrong. And we may well 
 ask where the blame lies. Do ideals lack 
 practical efficacy from want of contact with
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 145 
 
 the nature of things ? Or are men prone to 
 weigh the issues of life in a false balance : care- 
 ful, alas ! of the husks, careless of the grain ? 
 
 What manner of ideals the prophets of the 
 modern age have declared as the truth of things, 
 I have already indicated in briefest fashion. 
 The essence of their message, their ' scheme of 
 salvation,' whether it was delivered in the form 
 of Art or Morality, of Philosophy or Religion, 
 was the conviction that this world of ours and 
 the soul of man are saturated with spiritual 
 significance. They had found deliverance from .^(x-n. ^''*'_ 
 the cramping dualisms of the previous age. -.'^ers 7^- 
 Spirit and nature, man and the world, things >i^^^*T^' 
 sacred and things secular, did not stand opposed^/^j^^ ^ v<*^^ " 
 and exclusive ; but ' the Canopy of Heaven wasyA^n^ ' ' ',\,^^ 
 over all,' bringing harmony and reconcilement. ^'-T'^ ^^z/r ^'^ 
 These apparent opposites were found to \m]Aj ^pd - 
 one another, to subsist by mutual interfusion, 
 to interpenetrate so that they cannot be rent 
 asunder. Mind upholds and is upheld by the 
 world, like a net in the open sea. Form ex- 
 presses matter, and matter fills out the form. 
 Spirit sees its own expression in the world, 
 
 K
 
 146 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 and communing with it holds discourse with 
 itself. 
 
 Natural science corroborates the truth which 
 the poets and philosophers divine. Man, it tells, 
 is not an exception to the scheme of things, or 
 a divine after-thought and addendum to a dead 
 world. He is part of nature's tissue. He is 
 brother and blood-relation to the brute ; nay, 
 he was present in promise at the dawn of being, 
 waiting to be evolved. The potencies of his 
 spirit slumbered amongst the molten masses 
 and the fiery vapours. For all is one scheme. 
 Evolution tolerates no break, brings forth no- 
 thing altogether new, permits nothing to become 
 altogether old. It builds the living present 
 from the dying past, forgetting nothing, aban- 
 doning nothing in its course, least of all the 
 dormant promise of the emerging ideal. That 
 is immortal, present from first to last and 
 maintaining itself in every change. Every step 
 in the cosmic process is its self- emancipation, 
 until at length it stands declared in a form 
 worthy of itself ; and it shows itself as spirit. 
 
 In the light of this, the last achievement, the
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 147 
 
 meaning of the whole process becomes visible, 
 and Nature, bereft of life by the abstract dual- 
 isms of the previous age, comes to her own 
 again. Presenting her as instinct with purpose 
 and order and beauty, the poetry and philosophy 
 of the present day, present her in her truth. 
 For she is their treasury. She possesses what 
 they find, reveals what they discover, boun- 
 teously yields all that they gain. Their thoughts 
 are her communications : she fills their mind. 
 
 Enlightened by his world, guided and re- 
 strained by its mute laws, man achieves some 
 knowledge, and acquires some wisdom and 
 strength. Left to himself he were utterly with- 
 out resource, a blind soul groping in an empty 
 void. Man becomes strong only in the strength 
 of nature ; for he is sustained by her verities. 
 She is his coadjutor and partner in the enter- 
 prise of life. On the other hand, nature has 
 meaning and highest worth only in relation 
 to the man she evolves. She blooms into full 
 significance only in his spirit. For spirit holds 
 together what else were scattered, overcoming 
 the discreteness of time and space and circum- 

 
 148 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 stance. Only where there is mind is there 
 order, or beauty, or purpose, or significance. 
 
 It is this borrowing and lending which modern 
 thought has discovered, and the conditions 
 which make such commerce possible. Between 
 dead nature and an empty mind it could, 
 we believe, never arise. The wealth of the 
 world would lie inert and useless, and the 
 powers of man would be for ever dormant, 
 were they by nature divorced and isolate. 
 Why ! your very gold mines were but dross for 
 your aborigines. But man and the physical 
 world are not alien to one another ; they are 
 interfused, like mind and its experience. 
 
 Such interchange of commodities between 
 man's spirit and nature's is illustrated in many 
 poets ; but it is in Wordsworth that the real 
 depth of their inter-communion is most impres- 
 sively revealed. And their intercourse rested 
 for him upon the community of their being, the 
 essential unity of their substance. For him 
 there was between them hardly a distinction 
 of function, or a possible delimitation of do- 
 main. They partake in one another's moods,
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 149 
 
 because the same presence dwells in both. 
 There is no break or boundary between them, 
 any more than there is between the church- 
 yard of a sweet English village and the quiet 
 meadows beyond. 
 
 'Where holy ground begins, unhallowed ends, 
 Is marked by no distinguishable line : 
 The turf unites, the pathways intertwine.' 
 
 Nature blends with man, and man with nature, 
 
 as the colours fuse and fade into one another 
 
 in the evening sky. There is no passion, nor 
 
 purpose, nor brooding thought which is not 
 
 nature's very own. Gladness, love, the restful 
 
 quietude of a stable majesty, she possesses and 
 
 feels. They are her emotions. Wordsworth 
 
 educes them from Nature ; he treats her as a 
 
 ' mystic text, to be deciphered,' by those who 
 
 hold in their own souls the key. 
 
 'He looked — 
 Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth 
 And Ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay 
 Beneath him. Far and wide the clouds were touched, 
 And in their silent faces could be read 
 Unutterable love. Sound needed none 
 Nor any voice of joy : his spirit drank 
 The spectacle; sensation, soul and form,
 
 150 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 All melted into him ; they swallowed up 
 
 His animal being; in them did he live, 
 
 And by them did he live; they were his life.'^ 
 
 It is not easy to realize the depth of this 
 interfusion of spirit with spirit. An intercom- 
 munion that is voiceless because the mutual 
 understanding is deep, a love which is so 
 intimate that the boundaries between soul and 
 soul are obscured, we rarely witness : never, 
 probably, except in the deep recesses of the 
 happiest wedded life, w^here much has been 
 enjoyed in common and much endured. But 
 AVordsworth, at times, rose to this sublime 
 altitude in his communion with the natural 
 world : natural for him no more at such periods, 
 but a breathing soul. 
 
 But what are we to make of such an attitude 
 towards Nature ? How are we to understand 
 such passages as these, which constitute the 
 main body of Wordsworth's greatest poetry? 
 That their poetic value is unsurpassed, and 
 possibly unsurpassable, no one now would care 
 to deny. They are the evidences of his Genius, 
 
 ^ The Wanderer.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 151 
 
 and the speaking splendour of his unique en- 
 dowment: by them, 'he has widened the sphere 
 of human sensibility, and introduced a new 
 element into the intellectual universe.' 
 
 But, ' are they true ? ' is the question that 
 recurs. Did the ' Ocean's liquid mass lie in 
 gladness,' and was there ' unutterable love in 
 the faces of the clouds ' ? Or was not Words- 
 worth just taking the licence, pardonable, nay 
 admirable in a poet, of borrowing fair concep- 
 tions from his own peculiar realm of beauty, 
 and clothing an inanimate and indifferent world 
 with a spiritual splendour which was in no wise 
 its own ? Was he idealizing the real ; or did 
 he, in virtue of the intimacy of his deeper love, 
 see more deeply into the true essence of its 
 being than other men ? 
 
 For our purpose in these lectures the question 
 is fundamental ; perhaps I may add that it is 
 fundamental, too, for the true understanding 
 of the poet. 
 
 If we listen to the exponents of Wordsworth, 
 
 we shall find them at variance on this matter 
 
 One eminent man of letters tells us that ' it
 
 152 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 is best to be entirely sceptical as to the existence 
 of system and ordered philosophy in Words- 
 worth. When he tells us that 
 
 *One impulse from a vernal wood 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 Than all the sages can,' 
 
 such a proposition cannot be seriously taken 
 as more than a half playful sally for the benefit 
 of some too bookish friend. No impulse from 
 a vernal wood can teach us anything at all of 
 moral evil and good.' 
 
 Common sense endorses the criticism. So 
 does common experience of the common poets. 
 The warning against being too generously 
 credulous might even be deemed unnecessary. 
 When poets endow nature with the attributes 
 of man, they are manifestly, as a rule, indulging 
 their phantasy, and they do not mean precisely 
 what they say. We can distinguish between 
 their imaginative flights and their sober faith 
 without doing them any serious injustice. But 
 can we do so with Wordsworth ? Or are we 
 not deterred by the fact that he wrote in this
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 153 
 
 manner, and uttered these thoughts throughout 
 the whole of his highest poetic life ? It is pre- 
 cisely when he deals with such themes as these 
 that his diction acquires that mass and weight 
 which can hardly be accounted for unless it was 
 laden with the convictions of his deliberate faith. 
 
 That Wordsworth had ' no system or ordered 
 philosophy' is true in a sense. These imply a 
 method and a spirit of working which are not 
 compatible with the passion and intuition of 
 poetry. Philosophy carries us far ' into the 
 region of abstraction and division, of contro- 
 versy and contradiction.' Analyis", which is the 
 weapon of death, is so constantly in its hand, 
 and the synthesis it seeks is so far beyond its 
 power to complete, that the element in which it 
 lives ' must always be dangerous, and may even 
 be a fatal element to the poet.' 
 
 Nevertheless, the distinction between poetry 
 and philosophy is easily exaggerated. It is 
 even apt to disappear when they are at their 
 best. ' In the case of the greatest poets we 
 are driven by a kind of necessity to ask what 
 w^as their philosophy.' The poet 'looks steadily
 
 154 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 at his subject,' and his subject is human life, 
 and Wordsworth claimed to have done this in 
 fulfilment of his own mission. For, to him, 
 * poetry was the image of man and nature ' ; * its 
 object is truth, not individual and local, but 
 general and operative' — a definition which might 
 stand for the object of philosophy. On the 
 other hand, we are driven to feel the poetry 
 of the greatest philosophers. It is only those 
 who entertain ' a lurking consciousness that the 
 realities of the muse are but shows ' who can 
 avoid giving the name of poetry to the massive 
 conclusions and the profound enthusiasm which 
 come with the long- delayed and hard- won 
 affirmations of a Plato or Spinoza. The Muses 
 are sisters, and of one blood. 
 
 There is much nonsense in the talk about 
 philosophic ' system ' — a parade of mechanical 
 order where it does not exist. One would think 
 that a philosophy is an artificial contrivance, 
 compact and complete ; its parts fitted together, 
 morticed and jointed into premisses and con- 
 clusions, that can be pulled down and put up 
 again at one's pleasure.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 155 
 
 But no system of philosophy ever answered 
 such a description : not Plato's, or Aristotle's, 
 or Kant's, or Hegel's, nor even Spinoza's ; for 
 Spinoza's geometrical method is only surface 
 show. The philosopher's world is too large, 
 and he feels it in too many ways ; its organic 
 filaments are too numerous, its contradic- 
 tions too intense, and the unity of its life is 
 too intimate to permit the specious display 
 of the fiicile connexions of a barren logic. 
 Philosophy is, indeed, an attempt at coherent 
 thought, it employs argument and aims at proof. 
 But it seeks these where common sense seeks 
 them, seeking them with somewhat greater 
 persistency. There is no mode of thought which 
 is less esoteric, or more frank in its com- 
 munion with the open world. Nay, there is 
 none which is less the victim of its own 
 hypotheses ; for it examines the presuppositions 
 which ordinary thought lets pass, and shows 
 its best wisdom and its greatest care in the 
 choice of its premisses. Having chosen them, it 
 treats them as the medium of its thinking, and 
 the li^^ht of all its seeing. But it is continually
 
 156 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 briDging them to the test of fact, and its 
 application of them is their continuous new 
 birth and recreation. The 'system' grows like 
 a living thing, which experience is, for its roots 
 are in the still waters. 
 
 The relation between the poet and the philo- 
 sopher is described with precision in a letter of 
 Goethe to Jacobi — ' You can easily imagine my 
 attitude to philosophy,' says Goethe. ' When 
 it lays itself out for division, I cannot get on 
 with it; indeed I may say that it has occasionally 
 done me harm by disturbing me in my natural 
 course. But when it unites, or rather, w^hen 
 it confirms our original feeling as though we 
 were one with nature, and elevates it into a 
 peaceful intuition that under its external avyKpi(n<s 
 and StaKpia-i^ a divine life is present to us, even 
 if we are not permitted to live such a life 
 ourselves — then it is welcome to me.'^ Regarded 
 in this way it is altogether impossible to deny 
 'philosophy' and 'ordered system' to Words- 
 worth. To do so were to take away from him 
 
 1 Quoted by E. Caird, Essays on Literature : ' Goethe and 
 Philosophy.'
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 157 
 
 the main secret of his strength. He had his 
 enduring view of life, and an inconquerable 
 conviction as to the nature of the outer universe. 
 He held it to be true as a matter of fact that 
 the moral world and all its play of passion 
 ' extended far beyond the domain of human 
 nature.' No philosopher held to his conception 
 with greater tenacity ; no scientific truth was 
 maintained with more literal seriousness. There 
 is a slow and massive persistence, a deliberate 
 resoluteness, in his thinking upon these matters, 
 as of one who had planted his foot upon a rock 
 and will not lift it. 
 
 'To every natural form, rock, fruits or flower, 
 Even the loose stones that cover the high way, 
 I gave a moral life. I saw them feel 
 Or linked them to some feeling : the great mass 
 Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all 
 That I beheld respired with inward meaning.' 
 
 I find in such passages a spiritual realism 
 which nothing can daunt : a faith and a 
 philosophy that will brook no exception to their 
 sway. They are the utterances of one who 
 trusts his principles, and will follow them home. 
 There is more than metaphor or similitude, or
 
 158 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 analogue here : Wordsworth meant his weighty 
 words, for he believed seriously in 'Nature's 
 depth of soul.' There is more even than that 
 anthropomorphism which projects man's qualities 
 outwards. The poetry, like the religion, of the 
 world's youth might be content with anthro- 
 pomorphism. Wordsworth rejects it. Man, in 
 his view, was more recipient than donor. 
 
 * I would not do 
 Like Grecian artists, give thee human cheeks, 
 Channels for tears; no Naiad shouldst thou be, — 
 Have neither limbs, feet, feathers, joints nor hairs : 
 It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee 
 With purer robes than those of flesh and blood, 
 And hath bestowed on thee a safer good ; 
 Unwearied joy, and life without its cares.' ^ 
 
 There is one passage in the Ethics of Aristotle 
 which critics point to as a rare, if not the 
 singular occasion, when the calm of his scientific 
 spirit is broken by enthusiasm. It is where 
 he sees man's life of contemplation coming into 
 touch, nay, into unity with the life divine. 
 Such contact and fusion, he maintains, is not 
 possible except for intermittent moments. The 
 divine is high, man is weak and finite. He 
 
 * Brook.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 159 
 
 cannot long maintain himself at that altitude : 
 
 the atmosphere is too rare and his own nature 
 
 is too crass. 
 
 There is something analogous in Wordsworth's 
 
 view of man's communion with nature. She is 
 
 so replete with spiritual meaning, so 'majestical,' 
 
 that man is not fit to hold converse with her, 
 
 nor can he receive of her fulness, except in his 
 
 sublimer moods. He must be humbled first, in 
 
 order to be raised afterwards. He must be 
 
 ' Trained 
 To meekness, and exalted by humble faith,' 
 
 ere he can 
 
 'Hold up before the mind, intoxicate 
 With present objects and the busy dance 
 Of things that pass away, a temperate 
 Show of objects that endure.' 
 
 Nay, there is need of preparation, according 
 to Wordsworth, in order even to understand 
 the poet's communion with the world. ' And 
 for the sublime — if we consider what are the 
 cares that occupy the passing day, and how 
 remote is the practice and the course of life 
 from the sources of sublimity, in the soul of 
 man — can it be wondered that there is little
 
 160 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 existing preparation for a poet charged with 
 a new mission to extend its kingdom, and to 
 augment and spread its enjoyments ? ' ' Every 
 author, as far as he is great and at the same 
 time original, has had the task of creating the 
 taste by which he is to be enjoyed/ 
 
 Can it be that it is the lack of such prepara- 
 tion which leads us so often to apologize for 
 Wordsworth's way of presenting the real as 
 ideal ? ' He was inspired,' we say. ' When he 
 spoke in his great fashion, he was the vehicle 
 of enthusiasm : eVOeo? Km cKcppcou — filled with the 
 God, but out of his mind. For the light he 
 saw really never was on sea or land : the presence 
 which disturbed him with the joy of elevated 
 thoughts was not in nature, but in himself.' 
 Thus, by one means or another, often enough 
 unconsciously, do we take away the import of 
 his message, and convert his deepest faith into 
 matter for mere delectation. Translated into 
 plain speech our attitude towards him means : 
 ' he was not himself at the time, but the mouth- 
 piece of a spirit which was not the spirit of 
 simple truth.' It lied, in fact, but lied magnifi-
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 161 
 
 cently. For is it not certain that the nature 
 he adorned, and then adored, is dead, secular, 
 crass, material, and void of all intelligence ? 
 Do we not find it difficult even to raise the 
 issue seriously as between our own common-sense 
 with its materialistic realism, and the idealisms 
 of the poets and philosophers ? 
 
 Nevertheless, it was to raise this precise issue 
 that the poets and philosophers of our day have 
 laboured. Press as we may the distinction 
 between the truth of poetry and the matter-of- 
 fact of literal observation, which is the kind 
 of truth that philosophy seeks, Wordsworth 
 must still be regarded as a deliberate idealist 
 and a very great one. " As philosophers have 
 said that the ' real is the rational,' so a poet 
 may be allowed to declare that ' the real is 
 poetic,'" and the concord between them is far 
 deeper than their difference. Indeed, their 
 quarrel is not with one another, but with mere 
 common sense and the ordinary understanding, 
 which assume that they take the world ' as it 
 is,' but which really interpret it in the light 
 of transient needs and 'the cares that occupy
 
 162 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 the passing day.' For tlie eye brings with it 
 much of what it sees — the eye of the man of 
 the world, no less than that of the philosopher 
 and the poet. There is need of the consecra- 
 tion of the self ere the world can be conse- 
 crated ; nor is it less true that it is a desecrated 
 self which finds a desecrated universe. 
 
 The agreement of the poetic and philosophic 
 view of the world is easily accounted for. It 
 is the unique quality of the great poet and 
 the great philosopher that in all things they 
 see the whole. The world shows itself rational, 
 and it shows itself poetic, under the same 
 conditions, namely, when it is viewed suh 
 specie aeternitatis. Then its ' accidents ' are 
 divested of their unreason, and its events 
 cease to be crude occurrences. The poet finds 
 this unity by a method of his own, and 
 combines the sensuous material as a poet 
 should. Relations which are causal to the man 
 of science, or logical to the metaphysician, become 
 in his hands lyrical, mystical. Truth breaks 
 into measured music at his touch. But the 
 method of their attainment of the sense of unity. 
 
 ^B
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 163 
 
 and the way in which they respond to it, is a 
 matter of secondary consequence : the central 
 fact is, that they can admit no break in the 
 continuity, no ultimate disconnexion in their 
 object, no mere chance or brute accident. It is 
 ignorance and the lack of love and of the 
 insight which love brings that conceal the con- 
 nexions of the world, and make us deaf to its 
 harmonies. 
 
 For Wordsworth, most of all amongst the 
 poets, there was one principle in the universe, 
 and the principle was spiritual. No form of 
 being was void of it. 
 
 ' Spirit . . . knows no insulated spot, 
 No chasm, no solitude ; from link to link 
 It circulates, the Soul of all the world.' 
 
 To deny him this conviction, or to reduce his 
 conviction into a sensuously delectable make- 
 believe, is to degrade the poet himself into 
 an ' idle singer of an empty (Ic<,y. ' It is not 
 possible. 
 
 But, admitting that this view was held by 
 him as a theory, held seriously and even literally, 
 can it be admitted by us ? This, I conjecture,
 
 164 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 is the question that lies at the background of 
 all your thoughts. We shall come to it by 
 and bye. In the meantime may I ask you 
 to try to maintain a mind unprejudiced ? I 
 do not wish you to conclude that the poetic 
 version of the world is the true version. But, 
 on the other hand, I should like to warn you 
 against what we know is the greater danger, 
 namely, the assumption that the only version 
 which can be true is the prose version. 
 
 There are men for whom the best things_of 
 life are not real, and we call them shrewd. 
 They are the men who interpret the motives 
 and actions of their fellows by their meanest 
 aspects, and think thereby that they see beneath 
 the show of things. The man-of-the-world does 
 not believe in goodness that seeks no reward. 
 Devotion to the public good for its own sole 
 sake ; the simplicity of heart that does not 
 care very much for power, or rank, or con- 
 sideration, or wealth, is either false display, or 
 folly — ' the foolishness of the Cross,' as St. Paul 
 called it. 
 
 But it is just possible that these things verily
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 165 
 
 are, and that the worldling's interpretation of 
 the world is wrong. For, after all, the mind 
 of man must make what it receives. The eye 
 must construct the beauty of the evening sky, 
 even although it is there to be constructed : 
 the ear must catch the music in order that 
 the music may be. There are no harmonies 
 for the tuneless ear, nor possibly any beauty 
 of scenery for a cow. Verily it requires mind 
 to commune with mind, love to respond to love, 
 and a spiritual soul to know the spiritual world. 
 Some one told Johnson once, that he was no 
 gentleman. ' Sir,' was the reply, ' you are no 
 judge ! ' 
 
 Peter Bell, with his prose mind, may be an 
 incompetent judge of the verities of this world 
 of ours, and the man-of-the-world, with his 
 little faith in God and his great trust in the 
 Devil, may, after all, not be taking things as 
 they are. The music of the universe may have 
 been spilled into deaf ears, and its glory un- 
 folded over an empty eye-socket. 
 
 'He roved among the vales and streams, 
 In the green wood and hollow dell ',
 
 166 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 They were his dwelling, night and day — 
 But Nature ne'er could find the way 
 Into the heart of Peter Bell. 
 
 'At noon, when by the forest's edge 
 He lay beneath the branches high, 
 The soft blue sky did never melt 
 Into his heart ; he never felt 
 The witchery of the soft blue sky ! ' 
 
 The witchery was there ; but it was not there 
 for Peter Bell, nor for his ass. 
 
 And who shall cast the first stone at him ? 
 For are we not all beings upon whom physical 
 needs press first and with an urgency which 
 is imperious ; and is not the ascent through 
 sense to spirit arduous? Is it not difficult not 
 to take for granted, as a thing of course and 
 obvious, that the natural is alone verily real 
 and significant, and that all the rest is but 
 pleasing glamour ? The risk of such a pre- 
 supposition is, possibly, greatest of all in a 
 community like yours, constituted as it is in 
 great measure of men in whom the spirit of 
 industrial and commercial enterprise was so 
 strong as to break their old faithful intimacies, 
 and to bring them across the vast and barren
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 167 
 
 seas to brave the isolated expanse of a continent 
 all untamed. In the old and comparatively safe 
 life of the mother country, where the many paths 
 of life have been travelled smooth, and there 
 is wealth of matured experience and spiritual 
 tradition, there was much to sustain the indi- 
 vidual's hi2:her moods of mind. In this new 
 world, it would not have been surprising if 
 naught remained of a culture left behind except 
 its fading echoes. But I see evidences that, 
 in embarking, your forefathers did not forget 
 their spiritual freightage. And I trust that as 
 you proceed in the construction of your national 
 life, amidst the collision of parties and the strife 
 of interests, the spiritual view of things will 
 not be permitted to become obsolete ; but that 
 you will ever set value upon your churches, 
 your schools, and universities, and on all other 
 institutions, if there be any, whose mission is 
 the making of men. You will probably conquer 
 as you stand even though affairs press hard ; for 
 neither a nation nor an individual can constrain 
 nature into serviceableness without learning 
 something of their own needs and powers in
 
 168 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 the process. But your victory will be the more 
 sure for your idealists — for men to whom religion 
 is a great power ; and the love of learning, and 
 especially of the so-called ' useless learning ' of 
 the humanities, a great passion. 
 
 The significance of Nature for man depends 
 upon the evolution of man's own powers, as a 
 book has meaning only to him who can read 
 the language in which it is written. Nor have 
 the idealists in their exaltation of Nature for- 
 gotten this truth ; or, while making man akin 
 to her and setting him to learn from her as a 
 pupil at her feet, overlooked the significance of 
 his mind. It has been easier, it is true, both 
 for the poetry and for the science of modern 
 times to apprehend the order of the material 
 world than to conceive the reign of law amongst 
 the capricious fortuities of human volitions ; for 
 men's purposes are held to be free, and freedom 
 seems to be opposed to law ; and their interests 
 are multitudinous, and seemingly all entangled 
 and at war. 
 
 Nevertheless, even Wordsworth did not always 
 equalize Nature with man. His spiritual inter-
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 169 
 
 pretation of the world was the counterpart, if 
 not even the consequence of his mind's descent 
 into itself by ' treading the steps of thought. ' 
 For it is in the mind that the elements and 
 conditions of truth and beauty, elsewhere dis- 
 persed and sown abroad, are brought together 
 and blended into harmony. Hence man's 
 spirit is 
 
 'A thousand times more beautiful than the earth 
 On which he dwells : . . . 
 
 . . . itself 
 Of quality and fabric more divine.' 
 
 Frail as man is, and mortal, yet the ' liberty 
 
 divine' is his, 
 
 ' To roam at large among unpeopled glens 
 And mountainous retirements, only trod 
 By devious footsteps ; regions consecrate 
 To oldest time ; and reckless of the storm 
 That keeps the raven quiet in her nest, 
 Be as a presence or a motion one 
 Among the many there ; and while the mists 
 Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes 
 And phantoms from the crags and solid earth 
 As fast as a musician scatters sounds 
 Out of an instrument. . . . 
 
 What a joy to roam, 
 An equal amongst mightiest energies.' ^ 
 
 1 The Solitary.
 
 no IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 Thus Wordsworth's ultimate theme was Man ; 
 but not man psychologically considered as in 
 previous times ; for though the individual mind 
 
 'Keeps her own 
 Inviolate retirement,' 
 
 she is not isolated, nor does she beggar herself 
 by exclusion : she comprehends the world in 
 her own depths and rounds it off within herself. 
 Hence her marvel, and her mystic greatness. 
 
 'Not chaos, not 
 The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, 
 Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out 
 By help of dreams — can breed such fear and awe 
 As fall upon us often when we look 
 Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man — 
 My haunt, and the main region of my song.' ^ 
 
 ' There is,' he tells us in one of his great 
 prefaces, ' a meditative as well as as a human 
 pathos ; an enthusiastic as well as an ordinary 
 sorrow ; a sadness that has its seat in the depths 
 of reason, to which the mind cannot sink gently 
 of itself — but to which it must descend by 
 treading the steps of thought.' In youth, 
 Nature was to him ' all in all.' 
 
 ' The Recluse.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 171 
 
 'The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
 Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
 An appetite.' 
 
 That time passed ; but he fainted not, nor 
 mourned nor murmured. Other gifts had fol- 
 lowed, bringing 'abundant recompense.' 
 
 ' For I have learned 
 To look on Nature, not as in the hour 
 Of thoughtless youth, but hearing often-times 
 The still, sad music of humanity.' ^ 
 
 Reflexion, like a quiet evening spreading in his 
 
 soul, brought out the deeper meaning of the 
 
 world — a holy time, 
 
 'Quiet as a Nun 
 Breathless with adoration.' 
 
 For he found ' the gentleness of heaven brood ' 
 
 over the whole universe. 
 
 ' Listen ! the mighty Being is awake, 
 And doth with his eternal motion make 
 A sound like thunder — everlastingly.' 
 
 He found God everywhere. Everywhere was 
 the revelation of the same Eternal Spirit, to 
 which all things owed their meaning, their 
 music, and their inmost being and substance. 
 
 ^ Tintem Abbey.
 
 172 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 'And I have felt 
 A Presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things.' i 
 
 It was for her testimony to this Presence, which 
 was her own ideal meaning, that he loved 
 Nature so much, and found through intercourse 
 with her the stay of his faltering footsteps, 
 even when he trod the mazes of man's history, 
 
 'Intent to weigh 
 The good and evil of our mortal state.' 
 'Therefore am I still 
 A lover of the meadows, and the woods, 
 And mountains; and of all that we behold 
 From this green earth.' 
 
 Therefore am I 
 
 ' Well pleased to recognise 
 In nature and the language of the sense 
 The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
 Of all my moral being.' ^ 
 
 ^ Tintern Ahhet/. '^ Ibid.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BJIOWNING 178 
 
 The meaning of the world broadened for him, 
 while sense deepened into thought. As the 
 rill becomes a stream and the stream a broad 
 river, and still they carry within them an intui- 
 tion of the boundless sea which is their home, 
 so in early youth and thoughtful manhood the 
 murnmr of the Spirit of all the world was ever 
 in the poet's ears ; and it grew till it possessed 
 his soul enduringly. Men call this 'Natural 
 Religion ' : it is Spiritual Religion tuith Nature 
 as its all too narroiv vessel. 
 
 Browning's interest in man was more, and his 
 interest in Nature less direct than Wordsworth's. 
 The contrast between them, brief as it must be, 
 may prove instructive. 
 
 Wordsworth could at no time have described 
 himself as Browning did in his Preface to 
 Sordello : ' My stress lay on the incidents in 
 the development of a soul ; little else is worth 
 study. I, at least, always thought so.' But 
 Wordsworth lays no ' stress ' on the objects of 
 his contemplation, he was passive in their 
 possession ; there are few ' incidents ' in his 
 poetic life, it was too full of their omnipresent
 
 174 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 meaning ; and he found much besides man ' well 
 
 worth study.' He was like one who stood on 
 
 a bold headland looking far out upon the open 
 
 ocean. 
 
 ' On Man, on Nature, and on human life, 
 Musing in solitude, I oft perceive 
 Fair trains of imagery before me rise, 
 Accompanied by feelings of delight 
 Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed. 
 
 To these emotions, whencosoe'er they come, 
 Whether from breath of circumstance, 
 Or from the soul — an impulse to herself — 
 I would give utterance in numerous verse.' ^ 
 
 We miss in Browning the vast expanse, the ' 
 patient expectation, and the brooding peace. 
 He is a dweller in the cities ; and it is not 
 the music of the winds and streams, nor the 
 speaking pause of the silent mountains that we 
 hear in his verse. He makes his music, scat- 
 tering sounds from an instrument with many- 
 powers, and, like his own Aht Vogler, exultantly 
 raising his palace of praise. But his instrument 
 was of human device. And there are disson- 
 ances in his harmonies, discords that will hardly 
 
 ^ The Recluse.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 175 
 
 be resolved : for he is a Wagner among the 
 poets. He went forth to seek contradictions, 
 challenged the anomalous, outbraved scepticism, 
 bade evil do its uttermost — ' slid by semitones, 
 sank to the minor,' before he found his resting- 
 place again : 
 
 ' The C major of this life.' 
 
 No two great poets diifer more from one another 
 than do Wordsworth and Browning. 
 
 Yet their mission and their testimony were 
 'the same. They triumphed by virtue of the 
 same convictions. Browning's expression of the 
 unity of man and nature in God was not so 
 inevitable as Wordsworth's. It was more arti- 
 culate and defined and punctuated ; but it was 
 less like the circumambient atmosphere, or the 
 open eye of universal day. The unity of man 
 and Nature for Wordsworth was temperamental, 
 and it expressed itself in moods that were 
 common to both ; in the same gladness, love 
 and peace : the motion of the Spirit within 
 them was tranquil, like the deep breathing of 
 a strong man asleep. But Browning's intuition 
 of their unity was acquired. We feel that he
 
 176 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 had sat at the feet of modern science, even 
 though he transfigured its lessons. We hear 
 from him of the unity of the structure of 
 visible things. He brooks no break in the 
 ascent from lowest being to man's endowment ; 
 but he delights to mark its stages. The ele- 
 ments of physical and human nature are not 
 fused, as they are in Wordsworth ; and though 
 
 God 
 
 'Dwells in all 
 From life's minute beginnings, up at last 
 To man — the consummation of this scheme 
 Of being, the completion of this sphere 
 Of life,' 
 
 still the differences are marked and the dis- 
 tinction is kept inviolate. 
 
 It is interaction rather than interfusion that, 
 on the whole, we find in Browning. Nature is 
 a divine dwelling-place, and ' God joys therein,' 
 but she is not one with the spiritual life of 
 which she is the abode. She is rather the 
 instrument of the universal soul and the 
 external exhibition of its might and love, than 
 its living embodiment. And the unity of nature 
 with man is not always intrinsic and constitutive.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 177 
 
 'If two lives join, there is yet a scar, 
 
 They are one and one with a shadowy third : 
 One near one is too far.'^ 
 
 Nature is not spiritual as it were in her own 
 
 right for Browning, as she was for Wordsworth. 
 
 There were eighteenth-century orthodoxies in 
 
 his mind which seemed to prevent him from 
 
 lavishing the light of spirit upon natural 
 
 things quite freely. Man and nature fitted 
 
 one another, it is true — like the lute and the 
 
 player's hand. Nature was made to be known, 
 
 and mind was made to know her. 
 
 ' Wherefore did I contrive for thee that ear 
 Hungry for music, and direct thine eye 
 To where I hold a seven-stringed instrument 
 Unless I meant thee to beseech me play 1 ' ^ 
 
 Still the natural world does not escape 
 
 entirely from its naturalness. It needs the 
 
 medium of man's mind in order to become 
 
 emancipate from its latency. Nature is promise 
 
 unfulfilled, and in pointing to man she points 
 
 beyond herself. His 
 
 ' Attributes had here and there 
 Been scattered o'er the visible world before. 
 Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant 
 
 ' B^ the Fireside. 2 ']^^|^Q Camels. 
 
 M
 
 178 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 To be united in some wondrous whole, 
 
 Imperfect qualities throughout creation, 
 
 Suggesting some one creature yet to make, 
 
 Some point where all the scattered rays should meet 
 
 Convergent in the faculties of man.' 
 
 Even with the help of man the emancipation 
 is not complete. The calm of perfect know- 
 ledge, where spirit holds communion with itself 
 and is to itself transparent, is not reached. 
 There remains a strangeness to be overcome. 
 
 ' No intuition, but the slow 
 Uncertain fruit of an enhancing toil, 
 Strengthened by love.' 
 
 And even the love, which for Browning always 
 
 surpasses knowledge in its atoning powers, is 
 
 ' Not serenely pure 
 But strong from weakness, like a chance-sown plant 
 Which, cast on stubborn soil, puts forth changed buds, 
 And softer stains, unknown in happier climes. 
 Love which endures and doubts and is oppressed 
 And cherished, suffering much and much sustained. 
 And blind, oft-failing, yet believing love, 
 A half-enlightened, often chequered trust.' 
 
 Everywhere there is promise rather than full 
 fruition, process rather than possession, arduous 
 endeavour and aspiration without end, rather 
 than the tranquil joys of what is all in all
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 179 
 
 and at one with itself and adequate. There is 
 ever a battle to be won and a negative to 
 be overpowered ; and in consequence there is 
 stormful energy in Browning's assurance of his 
 faith. There is no circumstance in which he 
 will not bring it to the test, no strain to which 
 he will not subject it. His very joy was to 
 rim with silver-light the packed thunder-clouds 
 of man's most dreaded fate. 
 
 ' Set down my name, Sir,' said the Valiant 
 Man whom Christian saw in the Interpreter's 
 house. ' The which when he had done, he saw 
 the Man draw his Sword and put an Helmet 
 upon his Head, and rush toward the door upon 
 the Armed Men, who laid upon him with 
 deadly force ; but the Man, not at all discour- 
 aged, fell to cutting and hacking most fiercely ; 
 so, after he had received and given many 
 wounds to those that attempted to keep him 
 out, he cut his way through them all, and 
 pressed forward into the Palace ; at which there 
 was a pleasant voice heard from those that 
 were within, even of those that walked upon 
 the top of the Palace, saying :
 
 180 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 'Come in, come in, 
 Eternal Glory thou shalt win.' 
 
 So he went in, and was clothed with Garments 
 
 as they.' 
 
 This is the parable of Browning's poetic life. 
 The ardour of adventure in an unconquered 
 land flashes from his soul like sunshine from 
 armour. But Wordsworth was one of the 
 native inhabitants of the land of Beulah, 'whose 
 Air was very sweet and pleasant. Here he heard 
 continually the singing of Birds, and saw every 
 day the Flowers appear in the Earth, and heard 
 the voice of the Turtle in the Land. In this 
 country the sun shineth every day ; wherefore 
 this was beyond the Valley of the Shadow of 
 Death, and also out of the reach of Giant 
 Despair ; neither could they from this place so 
 much as see Doubting Castle. ' ^ 
 
 The tranquil gladness of contemplative frui- 
 tion, as of one who had left the gloom behind 
 and was ' stepping westward ' was Wordsworth's. 
 
 * I liked the greeting ; 't was a sound 
 Of something without place or bound ; 
 And seemed to give me spiritual right 
 To travel through that region bright.' 
 
 ' The Pilgrim's Progress.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 181 
 
 It was the tumultuous joy of a strenuous war- 
 fare in a stubborn land, the sense of moving 
 onwards, with a conquering host that numbered 
 the elements of heaven and earth, which was 
 Browning's. Still their faith in the nature of 
 things and in the security of the enduring 
 purpose that moved within them was the same. 
 And it was never shaken into frailty : not for 
 Wordsworth by the maddest orgies of the 
 French Revolution ; nor for Browning by his 
 dark explorations amongst the sunless recesses 
 of sordid and sinful souls. It is true that the 
 world appeared for Browning as 
 
 'A dread machinery of sin and sorrow'; 
 but it was meant ' to evolve the moral qualities 
 of man.' 
 
 * Winds blow, and waters roll 
 Strength to the brave, and Power and Deity.' 
 
 And the gain was worth the cost. 
 
 In one respect only did Browning's faith 
 show itself craven-hearted, at least as compared 
 with the dawning Idealism of his times. He 
 had inherited from the unintentional Agnos- 
 ticism of the schools of his early years a dis-
 
 182 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 trust of human knowledge which, consistently 
 held, should have supplanted his Idealism and 
 destroyed his faith. For this theory did not 
 merely teach — what no one will deny — that 
 human knowledge was incomplete, like every- 
 thing else that is human, and fell short of 
 perfection in every way. It represented know- 
 ledge as defective in hind, as failing abruptly 
 and finally ; for it never comprehended what 
 was real, nor ever escaped, in great things 
 or in small, from dealing in mere appearances 
 and false shows, 
 
 ' To know of, think about — 
 Is all man's sum of faculty effects 
 When exercised on earth's least atom, Son ! 
 What is, what was, what may such atom be ? 
 No answer ! ' ^ 
 
 Spiritual ambition, limitless in all else, was 
 
 rebuked in knowledge. 
 
 'Beyond thee lies the infinite - 
 Back to thy circumscription.' 
 
 We know neither God nor the world : and 
 our ignorance of these is matched by our 
 ignorance of moral matters. 
 
 ^A Bean- Stripe.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 183 
 
 ' Ignorance o'erwraps his moral sense, 
 Winds him about, relaxing, as it wraps, 
 So much and no more than lets through perhaps 
 The murmured knowledge — 'Ignorance exists." 
 
 Subjectivity, solipsism, relativity, limitation, 
 inconsistency, insecurity — every defect in know- 
 ledge which philosophy could discover or invent 
 is asserted and reiterated by Browning, especially 
 in his later years, when his poetic inspiration 
 waned, stricken by the blight of dialectical 
 argumentation. 
 
 'My curls were crowned 
 In youth with knowledge, — off, alas, crown slipped 
 Next moment, pushed by better knowledge still 
 Which nowise proved more constant : gain, to-day. 
 Was toppling loss to-morrow, lay at last 
 — Knowledge, the golden 'i — lacquered ignorance ! ' ^ 
 
 In all things wor thy s ave in knowledge, 
 
 progress was the di stinct ive note of man : 
 
 progress towards, nay within, an infinite ideal ; 
 
 for his life was divinely sustained, and the 
 
 might of God was in him. In knowledge man 
 
 was left to himself and there was no progress : 
 
 for what progress could there be, what less or 
 
 more of truth, in a realm peopled all with 
 
 phantoms ? 
 
 ^A Pillar at Sebzevar.
 
 184 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 There is fatal inconsistency here, which no 
 dialectical skill on the part of the poet — and 
 he tries many methods — could finally overcome. 
 He spares no endeavour to turn the failure of 
 knowledge to account ; but the hurt was never 
 healed. In itself knowledge was lacquer and 
 not gold ; it was useful only as means. 
 
 ' As gain — mistrust it ! Not as means to gain : 
 Lacquer we learn by. 
 
 . . . Knowledge means 
 Ever-renewed assurance by defeat 
 That victory is somehow still to reach, 
 But love is victory, the prize itself: 
 Love — trust to ! Be rewarded for the trust 
 In trust's mere act. In love success is sure, 
 Attainment — no delusion, whatsoe'er 
 The prize be.' 
 
 And when Browning comes back to ' Love,' 
 he speaks 'with the great mouth of the gods.' 
 * Taking his work as a whole, it is scarcely 
 possible to deny that Love is at once the supreme 
 motive of his art, and the principle upon which 
 his moral and religious doctrine rests. He is 
 always strong and convincing when he is dealing 
 with this theme. It was evidently the light of 
 his life ; it gave him courage to face the evils
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 185 
 
 of the world, and the power as an artist 'to 
 contrive his music from its moans.' It plays , 
 in his phnosopli}^tliej2art_that^ ' Reason ' filled 
 for Hegel, or the 'Blind WW^for^Sch^enh^^ 
 and he is as fearless as they are in reducing 
 all phenomena into forms of the activity of his 
 first principle. Love not only gave him firm 
 footing amid the wash and welter of the present 
 world, where time spins fast, life fleets and all 
 is change, but it made him look forward with 
 joy 'to the immortal course.' For all the 
 universe , seemed to him love-woven, all life is 
 but treading ' the love-^way,' and no wanderer 
 can finally lose it.^ ' The way-faring men, 
 though fools, shall not err therein.' 
 
 It is altogether beyond the scope of these 
 lectures to follow his exposition of this prin- 
 ciple, from which he drew his theory of life 
 and of all its setting : how love is the sublimest 
 conception attainable by man — the one way in 
 which he dares define his God ; how a life 
 inspired by love is the most perfect form of 
 
 ^ See the Lecturer's Browning as a Philosophical and Eeligious 
 Teacher. MacLehose, Glabgow.
 
 186 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 goodness, and is therefore at once man's absolute 
 ideal of conduct, and alone the object worthy 
 of his worship, worthier far than any exhibition 
 of power : 
 
 'For the loving worm within its clod, 
 Were diviner than a loveless God, 
 Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.' ^ 
 
 Love is in its nature so pure, ' so perfect 
 in whiteness, that it will not take pollution.' 
 In the corruptest hearts, amidst the worst 
 sensuality, it is still a power divine, 
 
 ' Incompatible 
 With falsehood — purifies, assimilates 
 All other passions to itself.'^ 
 
 'Ne'er wrong yourself so far as quote the world 
 And say, love can go unrequited here ! 
 You will have blessed him to his whole life's end — 
 Low passions hindered, baser cares kept back, 
 All goodness cherished.' ^ 
 
 To love, he tells us once and again, is the 
 supreme, the sole object of man's life, the one 
 lesson he is set to learn on earth : and that once 
 learnt, in what way matters little, ' it leaves 
 completion in the soul.' 
 
 ^ Christmas Eve. ^ Colombo's Birthday/. 
 
 Ubid. 
 
 \
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 187 
 
 ' There is no good of life but love — but love ! 
 What else looks good, is some shade flung from love, 
 Love gilds it, gives it worth.' ^ 
 
 As Wordsworth extended the domain of Spirit 
 
 over the whole realm of created being, so does 
 
 Browning teach the omnipresence of Love. 
 
 There is no fact without its purpose, no event 
 
 broken loose from the universal order, 
 
 'No detail but in place allotted it, was prime 
 And perfect ' ; - 
 
 and love is the soul of the pur^DOse, and the 
 source and security of the unfailing order. 
 Seen in the light of love, Nature ceases to be 
 merely natural. Matter and ' life's minute begin- 
 nings ' are more than they seem ; for the scheme 
 of love does not begin with man : he is its 
 consummation. And Browning delights to set 
 forth the stages of the ascent ; for he is a 
 true believer in Evolution. ' The secret of the 
 world was mine,' he says, revealing himself in 
 Paracelsus. 
 
 'I knew. I felt . . . 
 
 What God is, what we are. 
 What life is — how God tastes an infinite joy 
 In infinite ways — one everlasting bliss, 
 
 ^ In a Balcony. '^Fifine at the Fair.
 
 188 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 From whom all being emanates, all power 
 Proceeds ; in whom is life for evermore, 
 Yet whom existence in its lowest form 
 Includes.' 
 
 He goes back to the beginning of things and 
 
 follows the ascending steps from chaos to order, 
 
 from matter to physical life, from physical life 
 
 to the rational and loving life of man, from these 
 
 to God, who stands revealed in all the process. 
 
 ' The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth ' ; 
 
 ' the wrath sea's waves are edged with foam ' ; 
 
 ' strange groups of young volcanoes come up, 
 
 cyclops-like, staring together with their eyes on 
 
 flame ' ; ' the spring wind, like a dancing 
 
 psaltress, passes over the wintry earth, to waken 
 
 it ' ; ' the shining dorrs are busy, beetles run 
 
 along the furrows, ants make their ado, birds 
 
 fly in merry flocks ' ; 
 
 ' Savage creatures seek 
 Their loves in wood and plain — and God renews 
 His ancient rapture.' 
 
 'And all lead up higher, 
 All shape out dimly the superior race, 
 The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false, 
 And man appears at last.' 
 
 'All tended to mankind 
 And, man produced, all has its end thus far.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 189 
 
 But the true end is not yet, the Spiritual 
 
 development is still to come. 
 
 'In completed man begins anew 
 A tendency to God. Prognostics told 
 Man's near approach : so in man's self arise 
 August anticipations, symbols, types 
 Of a dim splendour ever on before 
 In that eternal circle life pursues.' 
 
 To Paracelsus, proud at first only of the 
 
 intellect and forgetful of the role of love, all 
 
 this seemed but the exhibition of Power. His 
 
 attitude was like that of the natural man. 
 
 'I gazed on power till I grew blind. 
 Power; I could not take my eyes from that. 
 
 And ' power ' left weakness unexplained. 
 
 ' I saw no use in the past : only a scene 
 Of degradation, ugliness and tears. 
 The recoi'd of disgraces best forgotten, 
 A sullen page in human chronicles 
 Fit to erase.' 
 
 But he learnt his own deep error. 
 
 'Love's undoing 
 Taught me the worth of love in man's estate. 
 
 . . . Love preceding 
 Power, and with much power, always much more love. 
 Love still too straitened in its present means, 
 And earnest for new power to set love free.' 
 
 Here, then, in the principle of love, was the
 
 190 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 primal motive of tlie whole movement ; and in 
 
 its light was all made plain, even ' the wear and 
 
 waste of faculties.' Love, having been made 
 
 wise in his own heart, was able 
 
 'To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, 
 To know even hate is but a mask of love's, 
 To see a good in evil, and a hope 
 In ill-success ; to sympathize, be proud 
 Of their half-reasonings, faint aspirings, dim 
 Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies, 
 Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts; 
 All with a touch of nobleness, despite 
 Their error, upward tending all, though weak; 
 Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, 
 But dream of him, and guess where he may be, 
 And do their best to climb and get to him.' 
 
 Many poets — may I not say all poets ? — have 
 
 sung of love, some of them perhaps with more 
 
 exquisite utterance and lighter grace than 
 
 Browning. But there is a respect in which 
 
 Browning stands alone . He has given to love 
 
 a moral significance, a place and power amongst 
 
 the elemental conditions of man's nature and 
 
 -<iestiny ; and he has given it a religious and 
 
 metaphysical depth of meaning, which, I believe, 
 
 are without example in any other poet. By 
 
 means of Love, daring to believe the Nazarene
 
 WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING 191 
 
 teacher and to adopt as the light of all his 
 seeing the conception which makes Christianity 
 sublime and, probably, the ultimate religion of ^ 
 
 
 mankind, he identified the human with the^^^_,^,^ t<- 
 
 divine, and found in love the atonement of the'^'^^."' 'f^ ^. 
 
 world. Here lay the secret of his power and'^'^^^r"^ • 
 
 all his hope. 
 
 The Idealism of Love brought it about that, 
 
 contemplating the fate of man, 'he never missed 
 
 footing in the maze,' ' nor feared the dark at 
 
 all,' nor grew faint for any adventure. 
 
 'If I stoop 
 Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud 
 It is but for a time : I press God's lamp 
 Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late, 
 Will pierce the gloom : I shall emerge one day.' ^ 
 
 Nor do the after-lives bring either doubt or 
 
 fear — for Browning conceives of ' life after 
 
 life in unlimited series.' 
 
 Summoning age to grant the harvest of youth 
 
 in this life, 
 
 'Life's struggle having so far reached its term, 
 Thence shall I pass, approved 
 A man, for aye removed 
 From the developed brute : a god though in the germ. 
 
 ' Paracelsus,
 
 192 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 And I shall thereupon 
 
 Take rest, ere I be gone 
 Once more on my adventure, brave and new : 
 
 Fearless and unperplexed 
 
 When I wage battle next, 
 What weapons to select, what armour to endue.' 
 
 A faith like Browning's and Wordsworth's 
 
 is a philosophy of life which, if true, we would 
 
 purchase at a great price. But had they the 
 
 right to it ?
 
 VI. 
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE. 
 
 How to test the statements as to the vital elements of 
 the modern creed : The Argument from Desire never 
 convincing — only Eeason can prove or disprove : The 
 demand we must make on the Idealists, and their 
 counter-demand on us : Idealistic Solu tions have value 
 only where experience is found_ to^ be^ discr epant : 
 The present times offer to Idealism the opportunity 
 which it requires, for modern life has outgrown the 
 creeds : Economic and social changes : The irrelevancy 
 of the Individualism of the past and the fatuity of 
 the Socialism of the present : The need of Ethical 
 change, before the condition s ^ a ^om^lete^^enoocracy 
 can be sustained : The attitude of the better spirits to 
 religion : The demand upon the Idealists altogether 
 just : Can the Idealists meet it ? 
 
 N
 
 VI. 
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODEEN AGE. 
 
 I HAVE been trying to show, thus far, that the 
 conception of the unity and spiritual nature of 
 things dominates the poetry and philosophy of 
 our day. The same conception is implicit in 
 the harmony of individual and social ends, 
 which is the condition of true or positive free- 
 dom, and the promise of which seems to be 
 present in our practical life. 
 
 Now, I should have no ground of complaint 
 if you refused either to assent to, or to dissent 
 from, these wide generalizations. It is not easy 
 to discern the tendencies which rule in an age 
 that is beyond all comparison rich in the 
 variety of its interests. Besides, we live amongst 
 them ; and we are always least conscious of those 
 tendencies whose sway is most constant and
 
 19() IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 universal, and whose possession of us is most 
 complete. When they have become the objects 
 of our reflective thought they are usually on 
 the point of losing our allegiance or of being 
 merged in wider principles. Comprehension 
 implies mastery, whether in the region of natural 
 or of spiritual matters. 
 
 There is one way, however, in which the 
 correctness of our generalizations may be tested. 
 In any experience, those conceptions are essential 
 whose denial would loosen its continuity, and 
 leave it a chaos of unreconciled impressions. 
 In order, therefore, to discover whether the 
 conception indicated is really vital to the 
 science, the poetry, the philosophy, or the 
 religious and social life of our times, we have 
 only to ask what would remain of them if it 
 were discredited. Supposing, for instance, the 
 principle of Evolution were found to be false 
 in its application to natural phenomena, or to 
 the history of human institutions, what would 
 the natural or the historical sciences retain 
 beyond a mass of contingent particulars waiting 
 to be colligated? Or supposing the conception
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 197 
 
 of the real as spiritual were to fail the Idealists, 
 what message would they still have for man- 
 kind ? Or, lastly, supposing that Wordsworth 
 had discovered that ' Nature is in reality trivial 
 and all her pomp tinsel ; that neither in her 
 nor in the mind of man is there any magnitude 
 of purpose or depth of soul, but only little 
 bustling passions which exclude all thought, 
 how much of his poetic inspiration would have 
 survived ? 
 
 Browning has left us in no doubt. He has 
 told us how the failure, even in one instance, 
 of the principle on which he had rested his 
 life would have destroyed it. 
 
 ' Of absolute and irretrievable 
 And all-subduing black — black's soul of black 
 Beyond white's power to disintensify — 
 Of that I saw no sample : such may wreck 
 My life and ruin my philosophy 
 To-morrow.' 
 
 There is no better way of discovering what 
 elements amongst our creeds are really vital to 
 us than that of asking what we would do if 
 they broke down. When the disciples were 
 asked, ' Will ye also go away ? ' Simon Peter
 
 198 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 answered, ' To whom shall we go ? Thou hast 
 the words of eternal life.' The loss of dominant 
 principles is the loss of life's significance. 
 
 Tried by this test, I have little doubt that 
 "^•-'j 's >e.i_§- ^j^^ conceptions we have indicated will be 
 ^S. :>o-es y.'.-t- admitted to be essentially constitutive of the 
 y «^/^ cwJ-e-Tuce, experience of our day as expressed in its 
 greatest poetic, philosophic and religious litera- 
 ture ; and, even also, though less manifestly, in 
 its ethical and social life. 
 
 But this does not show that the conceptions 
 are true, nor even that they have practical 
 import and real value. In one respect, indeed, 
 the conception of the unity: and spiritual nature, 
 of reality has very great value ; even, though 
 it should prove — as Comte thought — to be only 
 the departing shadow of a religious superstition 
 lingering in an ' enlightened age.' It has been 
 an incomparable anodyne to a suffering world ; 
 and it will always be so to those men who can 
 entertain it seriously. Nevertheless we cannot 
 conclude from this circumstance that the con- 
 ception is true. It may be only the needful 
 nutriment of the childhood of mankind, the
 
 
 
 CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 199 
 
 noble-lie that leads to truth. The ' argument 
 
 from desire' — namely, that those ideas must be 
 
 valid which meet man's deepest wants — is not 
 
 convincing in any of its forms ; for it rests upon 
 
 optimistic presuppositions which have themselves 
 
 to be verified. Desire is as apt to err as reason : 
 
 indeed, desire, though based on natural wants, 
 
 is itself the result of our rational constructooBr'^tir!!!:^!^^ 
 
 of our wants and of the obiects wjiiehr'we think , . 
 
 will satisfy them. Th.Q x^-^is^ in fact, no vi^i;^"^ ' ' t. ^g 
 
 of testing a ny truth except by reag^nT Theb/tLces ^ i^,?.- 
 
 appeal to experience, or to 'the heart,' is still "[^^/^ ^^^^ 
 
 an appeal to reason, and only reason can read(V^^ f'^jr^ 
 
 the results. For Reason is no abstract faculty, '^s 
 
 but a name for the whole man, who is himself 
 
 the living totality of his own experience, when 
 
 engaged upon discerning the true and false. 
 
 In short, this rational test cannot be avoided. 
 Idealism may find it difficult to satisfy the 
 demands of the critical intelligence, and the 
 failure to do so may bring grave consequences ; 
 but I must frankly confess that the demands 
 are fair. 
 
 It may be objected, however, that while these
 
 200 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 demands may be justly made upon the philo- 
 sopher, they cannot be pressed upon the poet. 
 Philosophy must retain its rights on scientific 
 sufferance, but poetry justifies itself in other 
 ways. * It has a truth of its own, a truth which 
 we feel, though from the scientific point of 
 view we may admit it to be an illusion.' ' The 
 highest poetry of our time — that in which the 
 most serious and select spirits find their food — 
 depends chiefly for its interest on what has been 
 well called ' the application of ideas to life ' ; but 
 these ideas are welcomed by the multitude of 
 the educated, not because they are regarded as 
 demonstrable, but because they are presented 
 in the rapt unreasoned form of poetic utterance, 
 and do not profess to do more than represent 
 a mood of the individual poet. ' ^ 
 
 I admit the justice of the objection, so far 
 as it implies that poetry is not meant to be 
 demonstrative, either in form or spirit. Never- 
 theless poetry may convmce, and do so, for some 
 minds, all the more eftectively because it makes 
 no logical pretensions. It may organize truth, 
 
 ' See Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, Introduction.
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 201 
 
 even though it does not expose the rational 
 
 filaments which colligate its elements. And 
 
 when it deals with the graver issues of life, as 
 
 the highest poetry does, it may both exercise ^^^^^ ca^vvai 
 
 this synthetic power and be faithful to the'^'^-e ccn^-revveb 
 
 medium within which it works. When'iFancy's us >«-. ■fi-'^s i^ 
 
 fingers touch the strings we^^jdxT not look for^^^^^'^'J^-^ ^ ^ 
 
 'truth,' but for pure aesthetic pleasure; but for%-^'7 
 the larger music we look to Imagination, and its 
 realities are never shows. ' Poetry,' says Words- 
 worth, ' is the image of Man and Nature.' ' Its 
 object is truth ; not individual and local, but 
 general and operative : truth which is its own 
 testimony, which gives confidence and com- 
 petence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and 
 receives them from the same tribunal.' Without 
 in the least confusing the methods of the poet 
 with those of the philosopher, seeking merely 
 to be sensitive and responsive to the charm of 
 his highest imaginative powers, we may still feel 
 that his ideas apply to life, and come to him, as 
 indeed we do, asking grave questions. 
 
 We shall even miss his poetic siguificance if 
 we approach him in a lighter mood ; for much
 
 202 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 of the power of conceptions lies in the way in 
 which they are entertained. No man, whether 
 he be poet or philosopher, has ever helped the 
 world with what is to himself a * may-be ' or 
 ' perhaps.' ' Every great poet . . . before he can 
 be thoroughly enjoyed has to call forth and 
 commu^iicate jpower^ says Wordsworth. But his 
 message has power only when it is freighted 
 .with his own personality. Nay, there is more 
 at stake in his mission than his own personality, 
 ^j^tlev He must appear as the emissary of a higher 
 tttcKc- ..^-authority, be carried along by thoughts he can 
 not control, like a ship whose sails are filled with 
 the winds of the open ocean. Every prophet, 
 whatever his garb, speaks in the name of the 
 nature of things, and, being sent on a royal 
 mission, he prefaces his words with a ' Thus 
 saith the Lord.' 
 
 'Be mine to follow with no timid step 
 Where Knowledge leads me ' 
 
 is Wordsworth's inauguratory prayer. 
 
 'It shall be mj^ pride 
 That I have dared to tread this holy ground 
 Speaking no dreams, but things oracular.' 
 
 There is indomitable firmness in this poet's tread,
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 203 
 
 as of one who walks, not in the realm of fancy, 
 but among objects that endure, and in the light 
 of open day. And, beyond doubt, this is one of 
 the secrets of his power. 
 
 We do well in demanding aesthetic enjoyment 
 of the poets ; but we do neither them nor our- 
 selves justice unless we demand much more. 
 
 They are not merely sublime confectioners. 
 They have a higher calling. We ow^e them 
 deeper reverence than the attitude of mind 
 which neither believes nor doubts : 
 
 'The easy acquiescence of mankind 
 In matters no-wise worth dispute.' 
 
 Great truths, however presented, can find no 
 lodgement in a frivolous mind. Not to every 
 eye is given the vision of the Holy Grail. 'Unto 
 the pure all things are pure ; but unto them that 
 are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure.' To 
 the worldly spirit, or a mind confused ' with the 
 busy dance of things that pass,' the doctrine 
 of a universal love which redeems the actions 
 of men from sordidity, and engenders a charity 
 that never fails and a beneficence which growls 
 not weary, is but the sound of a tinkling
 
 204 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 cymbal. BrowniDg may find the doctrine fill 
 the universe with light, but they neither need 
 nor trust it. * The light shineth in darkness, 
 and the darkness comprehendeth it not.' I 
 venture to say that the main obstacle to the 
 serious acceptance of the higher Idealism may 
 be in ourselves. 
 
 In any case, when we demand proof of his 
 doctrines, the Idealist is entitled to make a 
 counter-demand upon ourselves. He can not ask 
 for a credulous mind, but he must ask for the 
 earnestly enquirin.a; spirit. Philosophy has no 
 meaning for men at ease : its synthesis has no 
 vitality except where experience is baffled by its 
 own discrepancies. And there is one character 
 that never fails to mark every form of Idealism, 
 whether it be that of religion or poetry or philo- 
 sophy, and which distinguishes it from every 
 form of 'Naturalism.' It does not appeal, and 
 its doctrines have no cogency to any one, until 
 other helps have failed. Religion has been called 
 a sense of infinite dependence, and it always is a 
 refuge from the consciousness of guilt and weak- 
 ness. Philosop hical Idealism, i n like manner, is.
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 205 
 
 a recoil from the endless negation of the finite. 
 They are both, in different ways, the awakened 
 soul's last resort. Man does not begin with them ; 
 for it is a law of his sensuous-rational nature 
 that the ends he first desires are finite. The 
 wants which he first feels are animal wants, 
 and he seeks his good among things which do 
 not endure. When he first finds himself he has 
 everything to acquire, even his own spiritual 
 nature. He is in a far country, and has joined 
 himself to the citizens thereof, and he would 
 fain satisfy himself with husks ; till, at last, the 
 hunger of his soul awakens, and he remembers 
 his Father's house, where even 'the hired servants 
 have bread enough and to spare.' 
 
 In thus maintaining that spiritual things must 
 be spiritually discerned, and that the natural 
 man receiveth them not, ' for they are foolish- 
 ness unto him,' I am far from wishing to suggest 
 the existence in these matters of unique or 
 esoteric conditions : or to assert a difi"erent law 
 in ethical and religious experience from that of 
 ordinary experience. I wish, rather, to show 
 that the law is the same. If you cannot prove
 
 206 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 the truth of the things of the spirit to the 
 natural man, no more can you prove or disprove 
 a complex physical truth to an uneducated mind. . 
 A little child can make nothing of an advanced 
 mathematical formula. In all matters, both 
 theoretical and practical, we must know that 
 there is a problem, and understand something of 
 its terms, if we are to be either satisfied or dis- 
 satisfied with the solution that is offered. In 
 ^in,QAi any answer given to problems, whether they 
 be intellectual, or moral, or religious, or even 
 aesthetic, must lie in the terms of the problems 
 themselves ; for the answer consists in making 
 the congruence or incongruence of the terms 
 clear. Hence the first condition in all education 
 / is to stimulate the sense of difficulties to be 
 ; solved, that is, to arouse enquiry ; and there is 
 no way of stimulating enquiry so efficient as that 
 of bringing apparent contradictions into light. 
 Then the mind's most imperious need makes 
 itself felt, namely that of maintaining the unity 
 of its experience, or, in other words, its sanity. 
 When, therefore, we find Socrates making it his 
 mission to convict the Athenians of ignorance in
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 207 
 
 moral matters, or the Christian teacher convicting 
 the world of sin and calling it to repentance, 
 they are making use of a deep psychological law 
 everywhere applicable. There is no meaning in 
 unity except among^st differences ; no possibility 
 of proof e xcep t where there is a problem ; and 
 no sense of a problem except where discrepancies 
 are felt. The deep slumber of sense has to be 
 broken, if the wants of man's rational and 
 spiritual nature are to be satisfied. We need 
 'the sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go.' 
 ' He hath filled the hungry with good things : 
 and the rich he hath sent empty away.' 
 
 This, then, is the contribution which they 
 must bring to the Idealist who demand of him 
 some proof of the truth and value of his concep- 
 tions. They must come to him, if not with a 
 problem formulated, yet with the sense of an 
 experience which is inconsistent with itself and 
 demanding reconcilement. 
 
 But art, philosophy and religion are, as we 
 have already seen, paramount witnesses to the 
 harmony of their object. Their unique function 
 is to reveal unity in diff'erence, whether that
 
 208 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 unity be a law of thought, or a principle of life, 
 or that of the less definable but not less real 
 sense of beauty. And it is on this account tha:L 
 in all ages of the w orld we find men approach 
 them, saying : ' My purposes h a ve failed ; my, 
 life is broken and discrepant ; I come to be made 
 whole.' 
 
 Now, it is precisely because this condition is 
 being fulfilled in our own day that Idealism, in 
 one or other of its forms, promises to be of 
 supreme importance in times to come, and the 
 question of the validity of its deliverances to be 
 seriously asked. In whatever direction I look 
 abroad, whether it be upon the moral, or social, 
 or religious life, I find that its self-contentment 
 is broken. The hedonism in morals, and the 
 individualism in politics, which satisfied the 
 world from Bentham to Mill, inspiring much 
 most beneficent legislation, have become utterly 
 inadequate to our times. The deism to which 
 the natural world was so secular and the things 
 of spirit so simple and compassable is quite dis- 
 credited. We know that a religious theory 
 which places God beyond the realm of finite
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 209 
 
 being is without any defence against the assaults 
 of the Agnostic and Sceptic. If man is to find 
 God he must find Him in the worhi he knows, 
 as its very substance and essential being. But 
 what substitutes have we for the dapper creeds 
 of the past? What, besides the consciousness 
 that man's ethical nature is deep, and that duty 
 means more than pleasure ; that society is 
 complex, and that so far from being an external 
 concatenation of independent individualities, its 
 filaments are organic and its roots penetrate to 
 the inner soul of all its members ; that God is 
 immanent in the world, and that His immanence 
 in a world so stricken with evil is hard to under- 
 stand ? The early stars have set, and the dawn 
 has not appeared ; and we sit in deep darkness. 
 
 'The ignoble confidence, 
 Cowardly hardihood, that dulls and damps,' 
 
 rules no more. * The torpor of assurance has 
 been shaken from our creeds.' We are driven 
 onwards towards a more vital intercourse with 
 spiritual conceptions ; and the Idealism of the 
 poets and philosophers is finding its opportunity. 
 I shall not apologize for dwelling at some
 
 210 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 length on this characteristic of our times, for it 
 concerns us. I must try to show how our 
 problem has grown under our hands, and how 
 the familiar formulae fail. 
 
 First, then, as to the domain of ethics and 
 sociology, and the manner in which the changed 
 conditions of our outer life demand a different 
 response both of the mind and heart. 
 
 The egoistic life that would fain be solitary, 
 being narrowly bent upon its own exclusive 
 good, is being gradually constrained to enlarge 
 its outlook. Even if its ends remain unchanged 
 and the selfishness of its motives are untouched, 
 it is being compelled to employ other means, for 
 it is being driven to recognize that men's lives 
 are entangled together. There is no sphere 
 where egoistic conditions are more dominant, 
 or where mutual resistance and competition 
 are more obviously the law, than the sphere 
 of economics.. For it is the nature of material 
 as distin^ished from spiritual goods that they 
 canpot be distributed without lessening every 
 ,x0he's share. Nevertheless, even in this sphere, 
 co-ope ration is being revealed as the deeper law, 

 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 211 
 
 and the good of each to be the good of all. 
 The isolated endeavour is being convicted of 
 feebleness. However much they may desire it, ^^o^ 
 
 no individual and no nation can live for itself c^v-^^"'^ -^ 
 alone. Reluctantly, but surely, the whole world 
 is becomino; one mart. The ebb and flow of 
 commercial and industrial prosperity travel 
 round the world, and they creep into the most 
 quiet creek and remote inlet. All the civilized, 
 or productive, peoples of the world have one 
 economic destiny. There is less chance than at 
 any other time for the nation whose aims are 
 exclusive and whose means are narrow. The 
 nation which achieves most is that whose services 
 to the world are greatest, for true prosperity 
 takes a wide compass round.^ 
 
 1 1 do not want to meddle with the conditions under which 
 you think fit to trade with your neighbours. There may be 
 reasons applicable to a young country for fostering its enter- 
 prises under an artificial regime. Present economic loss may 
 have to be sustained for the sake of future economic gain. But 
 a policy of exclusion has in the last resort to i^eckon with the 
 nature of things, which is apt to win ; and nations which adopt 
 it will have to learn, perhaps through much suff"ering, that 
 those who desire to sell must buy, and those who would be 
 rewarded of the world must be willing to be of service to the 
 world.
 
 212 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 That these deep economic changes must bring 
 others in their train is obvious. Interchange of 
 commodities and identity of economic destiny 
 bring interchanges of another kind and a sense 
 of mutual responsibility in other matters. Social 
 and political impulses travel from state to state, 
 and the nations inspire one another to good ends 
 and to bad. What more convincing evidence 
 can we have of this than the tragic emulation 
 of powerful states in military equipment? Or 
 what is more certain than that it must in the 
 last resort stultify itself? Surely, the time 
 is coming when the over-burdened and long- 
 suffering peoples shall inaugurate a more massive 
 diplomacy than that of the diplomats, and make 
 possible another way of arbitrament than that of 
 violence. Li short, changed outward circum- 
 stances compel reflexion; the new world demands 
 the new response. Our ideas must be enlarged 
 and our motives become more human. 
 
 There is the same movement towards soli- 
 darity within the members of the same society, 
 bringing with it the same demand for new 
 interpreting conceptions and new ideals. Men
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 2i:i 
 
 whose interests are in the same objects, and who 
 stand in a direct competitive relation with one 
 another, worker with worker, salesman with 
 salesman, capitalist with capitalist, combine 
 together in these days — a fact which an in- 
 dividualistic theory could never have predicted 
 and cannot explain ; for from that point of view 
 no combination is more unnatural. But, by the 
 slow growth of circumstance and in spite of 
 theory, it is seen that there is practically no 
 purpose which a man can now achieve in isola- 
 tion. Whether he desires to hold his own in 
 the struggle for economic justice, or to further 
 any form of social good, he must unite with 
 others whose purposes are similar. The various 
 social inter ests are organized, whet her they be 
 industrial, or commercial, or educational, or 
 charitable ; and society from top to bottom is 
 striated and stratified into classes. The con- 
 ditions of the individual's activities have thus 
 been changed, and even if his purposes remain 
 the same he must seek to attain them in another 
 way. He is now one of a class, and it is in 
 union with it that he fails or prospers : his fate
 
 
 214 IDEALISM AS A BHACTICAL CREED 
 
 \, 
 
 is united with that of othete in similar circum- 
 stances to his own. 
 
 You may say that the change has only 
 enlarged the scope of selfishness, and placed in 
 the hands of a more remorseless egoism weapons 
 which are more powerful. And it is true that 
 <-*'^ all things which multiply a man's strength by 
 r^*l <v'-"', uniting him with his fellows increases his power 
 ''" \^ ^^ ^ for evil as well as good. New conditions always 
 bring new opportunities for both right and 
 wrong, and the higher we climb the deeper the 
 fall. All the same the movement is onwards 
 and upwards. The sphere of responsibility for 
 the individual is widened, and even fidelity con- 
 fined to one's own class is so far better than 
 loyalty to one's self alone. 
 
 But these classes and interests collide : some- 
 times with such momentum as to arrest the 
 industries and imperil the stability of the State. 
 True ! but in this case also new risks imply new 
 opportunities, and services, not required before, 
 are called forth. Men of wider outlook, who 
 recognize in the State the palladium of all the 
 interests, see in these collisions a demand for
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 215 
 
 controlling the colliding forces. As individuals 
 who deem themselves wronged, or their rights 
 denied, are no longer permitted to be judges in 
 their own cause, and executors of their own 
 decisions, so the time is coming when the State 
 shall sit in judgment upon these wider contro- 
 versies. Methods of violence shall give way to 
 mei^hods of peace ; he who suffers most or has 
 /least endurance will not on that account be held 
 to be wrong; and the cause which is most just 
 shall be deemed the stronger. 
 
 One way or another, under the pressure of 
 blind forces blindly obeyed, a condition of affairs 
 is arising in which the individual's life is known 
 to be more deeply implicated in the life of his 
 fellows, and in the well-being of the whole com- 
 munity of which he is a member. The State 
 grasps his life more closely and on more sides, 
 and he is more variously, if not in the last 
 resort more deeply, involved in its welfare than 
 at other periods — for at all times the State is 
 ultimately all in all for its citizens. The duties 
 of the Modern State being enlarged and its 
 functions being more numerous — which is only
 
 216 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 another way of saying that its opportunities of 
 service to its members are greater — the risks 
 of bad government are also greater, and the 
 damage which ignorance, or selfishness bring, 
 whether on the part of the rulers or the ruled. 
 But if the risks are greater, so also are the op- 
 portunities. There are greater forces in the field, 
 and they are more beneficent, to him who can 
 comprehend and use them. The best mind of the 
 people is more imperiously driven to more ear- 
 nest dealing with the conditions of social welfare. 
 Government by ignorance or party passion, in- 
 difference to the State, and a spirit of slack 
 citizenship, seeing that they bring such intimate 
 perils, are being recognized as public wrongs. 
 Our statesmanship will acquire gravity : the 
 State will acquire a new^ sacredness and ' be 
 looked upon with other reverence.' It will be 
 known as a partnership in which the citizen has 
 staked not only his worldly prosperity, but his 
 personality. We shall think of it after the 
 great way of Edmund Burke. 'It is a partner- 
 ship in all science ; a partnership in all art ; a 
 partnership in every virtue and in all perfection.
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 217 
 
 As the ends of such a partnership cannot be 
 obtained in many generations, it becomes a 
 partnership not only between those who are 
 living, but between those who are living, those 
 who are dead, and those who are to be born.'^ 
 
 To those who are worthy of it citizenship in 
 such a state will appear to be no mean privilege. 
 And the yoke in so great a service will seem to 
 them easy ; for the greatness of a cause lightens 
 the burdens it imposes. It converts responsi- 
 bilities into a valued trust, and gives to the 
 individual life a noble content and the best of 
 destinies. 
 
 Thus is the selfishness of humanity being 
 rebuked and its folly exposed. By the very 
 stress and strain of circumstance man is being 
 moralized ; and the world is in one conspiracy 
 against his meanness. Who then can say that 
 the ancient rubrics hold, or that in the domain 
 of either economics, or morals, or social life, or 
 politics, the negative freedom of the past, with 
 its ' Let things be ' and ' Do not interfere,' can 
 furnish us with the guidance which we need? 
 
 1 Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.
 
 218 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 Are we not compelled, seeing that the capacity 
 of social forces for good and for evil has been 
 thus expanded, and the life of every individual 
 is more widely interfused with the general wel- 
 fare, to seek some better way of comprehending 
 them than is furnished by the abstract indivi- 
 dualism of the past ? 
 
 And is the Socialism of the present day any- 
 thing; except its complementary erro r ? Is there 
 any reflective person who would for a moment 
 maintain that the new economic and social 
 conditions which those who call themselves 
 Socialists seek have any virile purposefulness ? 
 Verily ! poverty of imagination is deep poverty. 
 I have sometimes wondered who is most stricken 
 with it, whether it be those who advocate, or 
 those who fear, the impossible schemes of the 
 more ambitious Socialism. Can you conceive a 
 people, like ours at home, sitting, some of them 
 in hope and some in fear, of a levelling socialism 
 while it is unable to 'reform the House of 
 Lords ' ; or trembling, some of them with eager- 
 ness and some with anxiety, lest private pro- 
 perty should be annulled, while its sense of the
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 219 
 
 rights of private property is so deep that twenty 
 years seem too short a notice for the State to 
 annul licences which are annual ? 
 
 Nevertheless, impossible and even absurd as 
 socialistic schemes generally are, it is Socialism 
 in some form or other alone that evinces any con- 
 sciousness of the deepened solidarity of modern 
 citizenship, or dreams of a constructive states- 
 manship that will fit its exigencies. Its gravest 
 error of all probably is that its attention has so 
 far been confined to impracticable changes in 
 economic conditions ; and that there is lit tle 
 consciousness of the nee d of the ethical change 
 whi ch would make thes e conditions t olerable. 
 It is not seen that a socialised State brought 
 upon a people morally unprepared would be 
 the deepest calamity any nation could be called 
 upon to meet. No State requires governors so 
 enlightened or so unselfish as the State in 
 which all are governors. A genuine democracy 
 demands the highest civic virtues, with the 
 alternative of the deepest and most irremedi- 
 able civic tragedy ; for the actions of the citizens 
 of such a State are scanned only by themselves,
 
 220 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 and the only critics their deeds can have are 
 the consequences which follow from them. 
 
 Thus, then, the expansion of the range of 
 ethical responsibility ; the greater complexity of 
 the modern State ; the deeper implication of the 
 lives of the individual citizens therein ; the in- 
 crease in the variety of its functions, and there- 
 fore in its capacity either for mischief or for 
 good ; its more democratic character, which 
 subjects it only to its own caprice and with 
 the removal of external restraints makes inner 
 restraint imperative ; the irrelevance of the Indi- 
 vidualism of the past to its more highly organic 
 character, and the impractical and un-ethical 
 character of the Socialism of the present — all 
 these things taken together constitute a reason, 
 which is also a necessity, for the more earnest 
 questioning of our ideals of life. 
 
 Nor is it difficult to believe that the only 
 ideals which can sustain, and be sustained by, 
 the new conditions of greater social solidarity, are 
 those which inspire that social solidarity which 
 leaves its members free. Nothing can save the 
 highly-organized and many-functioned States of
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 221 
 
 the future from being the most remorseless and 
 ubiquitous of tyrannies except the consciousness 
 of fellowship and brotherhood amongst its 
 members and free devotion to its welfare. But 
 this is only to say that the Idealism of Love, of 
 which the poets speak, and the consciousness of 
 unity amidst the deepest differences, — namely, 
 the differences which separate one rational indi- 
 vidual from the other, to which the philosophers 
 bear witness, — furnish the only adequate prin- 
 ciple of conduct. 
 
 I am aware that their Idealism stands in need 
 of articulation. Its conceptions are general, and 
 they must be defined and particularized into 
 detailed maxims of personal conduct and into 
 specific enactments of the State. The hedonism 
 of the last period in our history had its Bentham, 
 and he deduced from its most inadequate ethical 
 content 'principles of legislation ' whose practical 
 value in the hands of statesmen proved in- 
 estimable. The social philosophy which can 
 make an analogous use of the far deeper Ethics 
 of Idealism has not as yet appeared, except in 
 merest outline ; statesmen do not strive to legis-
 
 222 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 late in its light as they did in the light of 
 universalistic hedonism ; and no one has formed 
 even a proximately adequate conception of a 
 concrete State based upon its principles. And 
 since the polity which is latent in its ideals has 
 not been devised, its ideals have not been put to 
 the test of facts. But it is such a practical test 
 that hypotheses demand, because it is only in 
 the context of circumstance that objects reveal 
 their nature. Nor, I believe, is there rational 
 doubt that they will stand the test. Can you 
 question the economic strength, the unity of 
 purpose, the stability, the power in all worthy 
 ways of a nation which, instead of stumbling 
 blindly along a path unknown, and being driven 
 hither and thither by the gusts of private and 
 political passions, shall be inspired and guided 
 by such ideals, and shall set itself resolutely, by 
 methods well-weighed, to realize them in its 
 deeds ? Until we bring it to this practical test, 
 we shall not be in vital earnest with our Ideal- 
 ism, and it is on that account that neither proof 
 nor disproof is as yet possible. Its conceptions 
 may be true ; poets and philosophers who have
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 223 
 
 lived in their atmosphere have found them satis- 
 fying. But if, for us, they are still in the realm 
 of conjectures, it is because we have left them 
 there, instead of bringing them to the proof of 
 life. 
 
 I turn now, for a moment, to indicate the 
 same movement in the realm of religion : for 
 there, too, ' the torpor of assurance has been 
 shaken from the creeds,' and new conditions have 
 brought new demands. At ' Home,' beyond all 
 doubt, the spirit of enquiry is more earnest than 
 it was in the past. There is less flippancy 
 amongst both believers and sceptics ; neither the 
 assent to, nor the dissent from, the creeds is so 
 shallow. More fundamental issues have been 
 raised. The assaults, not of science, but of 
 science which in the middle of last century was 
 by an illegitimate extension perverted into a 
 materialistic view of the world ; the application 
 of the methods of literary and historical criticism 
 to the sacred books ; the hypothesis of the con- 
 tinuity of man with nature and of the uniformity 
 and universality of the deeper laws of the de- 
 velopment of the human race, and of the unity of
 
 224 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 its history ; the impatience of dogmatism and the 
 repudiation of any authority that would brow- 
 beat private judgment; democracy in the domain 
 of the creeds as well as in that of politics — all 
 these forces have conspired together to bring the 
 central tenets of religious faith to a test not for 
 a moment to be paralleled for its severity in any 
 previous age. Moreover, weapons once ejBfective 
 for their defence are now corroding with rust. 
 Not long ago enquiry could be abashed and 
 silenced. It was only necessary to point either 
 to the authority of a Church or to the infalli- 
 bility of a Book ; the voice of the private con- 
 science was hushed ; reason was expelled from 
 the court as an incompetent witness. But the 
 prejudice against reason is now dead, amongst 
 the educated classes. They know that its powers 
 are limited and its weakness and inconsequence 
 and untrustworthiness great. But they cannot 
 afford to forego the use of imperfect faculties, 
 else they would use none. For reason is not 
 unique in this respect ; nor has the reason which 
 doubts or denies another source or another struc- 
 ture than the reason which assents and defends :
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 225 
 
 in both cases it stands for the whole man striving 
 to know. Truths which are above reason to 
 question are above reason to aver ; and great, 
 indeed, were the confusion if the better reason 
 were not to prevail ; for there is no other court 
 for deciding between truth and error. 
 
 It is a profound ill-service to religion to 
 refuse to bring its truths to the proof of 
 reason. It is to carry into an emancipated age 
 methods which could be tolerated only when 
 men had not assumed the responsibility of their 
 own lives. Now, the only result is to create 
 suspicion of the deliverances of the religious 
 consciousness, and to deprive it of the most 
 powerful of all support, namely that which it 
 would derive from evincing before an impartial 
 tribunal, the soundness of its principles and the 
 rational coherence of its contents. Besides, what 
 is the difference between religion and supersti- 
 tion, except that the former invites and the latter 
 evades enquiry ; that the former claims to gain 
 in convincing power as the experience of 
 humanity grows and its wisdom ripens, while 
 the dominion of the latter becomes less secure
 
 226 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 aud more confined — its phenomena being ex 
 hyjyothesi outwith the laws of experience ? 
 
 Such, I believe, is the attitude of the better 
 mind of the day towards religion. It demands 
 that religion should sustain enquiry. 
 
 And the enquiry can not be postponed. In 
 every department of man's experience there 
 emerges an interregnum between the overthrow 
 of a dogmatic or external authority and the safe 
 enthronement of a new and free authority within. 
 In the region of the moral, the social, or political 
 life, emancipation from outer law is apt to be 
 followed first by the chaos of caprice — which 
 is the freedom of the rudimentary will. In 
 the province of theory dogmatic authority is 
 followed by doubt and disbelief The religion of 
 authority when it is expelled naturally leaves 
 behind it a kingless realm, for the first effect of 
 criticism is to destroy ; and the most destructive 
 criticism of all is that which a wider and maturer 
 experience passes upon a narrower and more 
 crude. Creeds can survive the exposure of 
 logical in coherencies ; for men believe many 
 things which they know not how to reconcile.
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 227 
 
 But when the experience which they are meant 
 to define and express outgrows them, their doom 
 is pronounced. They become dead hypotheses, 
 and fall away, like withered ivy, from the life 
 to which they cling. Men do not concern them- 
 selves even to refute them, any more than 
 they refute the opinions of the days of their 
 childhood. 
 
 I am unable to resist the conviction that in 
 these days the religious and ethical experience 
 of reflective men has thus outgrown the definite 
 creeds. I do not say that it has outgrown the 
 deeper principles which the creeds were meant 
 to express : I believe these are immortal. But 
 the expression of them which satisfied other ages, 
 different in their outlook and in their very tem- 
 perament, has in our day become inadequate 
 even to untruth. There are men ' whose very 
 life is in religious ideas,' but they know no 
 expression of these ideas which does not render 
 them suspect, or even illusory. 'They, there- 
 fore, dwell, as it were, in a world of eclipse and 
 paralysis, neither able to find a faith nor to do 
 without one, sitting
 
 228 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 'By the poisoned stream of life, 
 Waiting for the morrow that shall free them from the 
 
 strife.' ^ 
 
 That their despair is the product of their own 
 growth they have not discovered ; nor that the 
 experience which condemns the creeds contains 
 the elements, were they but comprehended, of a 
 better faith. 
 
 These are the men whose demand for a more 
 adequate philosophy of life are altogether legiti- 
 mate. In so far as Idealism professes to furnish 
 such a philosophy they have a complete right to 
 ask that it shall prove its averments. Their 
 demand is in all respects the same as the demand 
 which our times make for more adequate prin- 
 ciples in the light of which its social phenomena 
 may be interpreted — unless indeed their de- 
 mand be still deeper. It is the demand of a 
 life which is richer and more free for a wider 
 and better articulated faith in which to dwell at 
 peace. And it can be met only in the way of 
 freedom : not by the methods of dogmatism any 
 more, but by those of proof, if such a method be 
 
 1 ' The Problem of Philosophy at the Present Time ' : Caird's 
 Essays on Literature. MacLehose, Glasgow.
 
 THE CALL OF THE MODERN AGE 229 
 
 possible : if it be not, then, at least, by the 
 method of rational probability. For only in this 
 way can their life be again made coherent, and 
 only the synthesis of reason can reconcile. 
 
 But is such proof, or is such rational proba- 
 bility attainable ? This is the question which 
 the Idealist has to meet. His opportunity has 
 come ; the conditions he requires are to his 
 hand ; can he rise to the demand ?
 
 VII. 
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM. 
 
 The collisions within modern experience : Idealism has 
 deepened the problems of modern life : Hybrid theories 
 which would avoid ultimate issues, and why they must 
 fail : Man at his best only when in touch with ultimate 
 issues : That the opposites of experience are correlates : 
 What follows — is it Pessimism and Scepticism, or Opti- 
 mism and Idealism ? How opposition implies unity, and 
 the actual implies the ideal ; and how Pessimism and 
 Scejiticism play fast and loose with their own premisses : 
 The only true inference is that the ideal is real and 
 the real ideal, and that it is Man and not God 
 which is in the Making : The bearing of this view 
 on man's freedom : Why is life a process never com- 
 pleted, and whether optimism stultifies morality : The 
 one circumstance which would destroy Idealism and 
 Optimism ; but there is no evidence that it exists : The 
 hypothesis of Idealism is the sanest yet discovered, and 
 is well worth subjecting to the strain of a nation's 
 practice.
 
 LECTURE VIL 
 
 THE ANSWEE OF IDEALISM. 
 
 The spiritual synthesis of modern poetry and 
 philosophy can have little meaning except to 
 men who have, at least to some extent, sounded 
 the depths of the discrepancies of experience. 
 But the variety and magnitude of the interests 
 of modern life and their violent collisions ; the 
 change in the structure of society which is one 
 of the consequences of the organization of men 
 in pursuit of these inconsistent interests ; the 
 demand which the change makes for a more 
 adequate intellectual, moral and political response 
 if the new circumstances are to be comprehended 
 and controlled ; the emancipation of men's minds 
 from the bonds of dogmatic authority, whether 
 sacred or secular, and the obsolescence of the 
 religious and political creeds, have co-operated
 
 234 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 together to make the discrepancies of experience 
 undeniably evident to all reflective men. There 
 is, probably, no need of the time so deep or so 
 imperative as the need of surer guidance amongst 
 the problems of the social and religious life. 
 
 No doubt the ultimate principles on which 
 man's welfare rests are permanent ; and in this 
 respect ' there are no discoveries in morality.' 
 But although there is no need of a change of 
 principles, principles change ; like living things, 
 they preserve t heir permanence through constant 
 ^'^I'^-ji^*^'' reconstruction. Every application of principles 
 •u«^ to new circumstances elicits some new feature 
 of their meaning. Their adaptation is their re- 
 interpretation. But this is a difficult process. 
 And if the change of circumstance is great, there 
 ordinarily ensues an interval between the failure 
 of the ancient and the establishment of the new 
 moral and mental habitudes during which all is 
 in flux and uncertainty. The ancient rubrics 
 fail and there are none to take their place ; the 
 positive and continuous life which moves from 
 the one form to the other is undiscerned, and 
 men do not comprehend the tendencies which
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 235 
 
 they obey ; or, in other words, ' they do not 
 understand their times.' At such periods the 
 best which men possess wherewith to meet the 
 future are vague aspirations for a good whose 
 features they cannot clearly see. They yearn 
 for they know not what, and their thoughts are 
 like homeless winds, with moaning in their 
 music. The issues amongst which they live 
 are vast and hidden in great darkness. Such 
 a period is ours. Grave questions are being 
 gravely asked ; and the answers do not satisfy. 
 The conditions which demand constructive deal- 
 ing with the social and moral and religious life 
 are present, and the opportunity of Idealism 
 has come. 
 
 These were the conclusions at which we arrived 
 in the last lecture. We have now to ascertain 
 whether the synthesis which Idealism offers is 
 trustworthy. 
 
 The first and most palpable effect of Idealism 
 has been to aggravate the difficulties which it 
 professes to remove, and which were implacable 
 enough already. Its attempts at synthesis have 
 shown how intractable the contradictions of ex-
 
 236 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 perience are ; jts assert ion of the u nity and_gf_ 
 the spiritual nature of t he world_haj_accentu^ 
 ated the incoherencies of life. There is not one 
 spiritual problem, whether in morality, or in 
 social life, or in religious faith, which it has not 
 deepened. A brief contrast between the present 
 age and its predecessor will make this evident. 
 / A little while ago the realm of nature was 
 ' hardly recognized as a coherent whole. The 
 physical sciences were feeble, they worked apart, 
 their provinces did not intersect. Physical life 
 stood, apparently, unrelated to its material sub- 
 strate : it was taken as a clear addition to it. 
 Within the domain of physical life itself there 
 were fixed species, each of them describable by 
 itself: the problem of their connexion was not 
 raised. Man as a rational and responsible being 
 stood aloof from all — an exception and adden- 
 dum to the natural scheme. Even his own 
 t nature was riven in two : his b ody was merely 
 , ■yytfy- ^the tem porary tenemen t of his soul.. On all 
 t^'/-^ sides there were interstices, and rifts, and oppor- 
 tunities for miraculous interventions — which 
 came. For, beyond the natural world and
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 237 
 
 around it, ready to flow in upon it at any 
 moment, there was another. It was the object 
 of faith rather than knowledge, of spiritual rather 
 than natural vision ; it was dogmatically asserted 
 on the one side and meekly accepted upon the 
 other, God dwelt in that remote region of 
 moveless mystery, in sovereign majesty inscrut- 
 able ; ' He made darkness his secret place ; his 
 pavilion round about were dark waters and thick 
 clouds of the skies.' But of intrinsic or rational 
 continuity between that world and this, there 
 was none ; and experience here gave little clue 
 to experience there : for was not experience in 
 this world merely natural, and spiritual experi- 
 ence assumed to be mere mystery ? The scheme 
 was in one sense simple ; its elements were con- 
 ceived in terms of the imagination, they were 
 peacefully ranged side by side, and the problem 
 of their coherence was not raised. There was 
 the superintendence of a sovereign will whose 
 ways could neither be questioned nor compre- 
 hended : and that sufficed, for the demands 
 which men made upon their deity were not 
 deep. They did not ask for spiritual intimacy.
 
 238 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 and they were not unwilling to bow the soul 
 in worship before power inscrutable ; for the 
 spirit of religion was not free. 
 
 Under these conditions^ the principles of 
 man's spiritual life were easily maintaJtred, ^ He 
 was free because his soul was detached from th e 
 natural order. He was responsible, because he 
 was subject to a sovereign will. He worshipped, 
 for he was weak in the presence of Power and 
 filled with awe in the presence of mysterious 
 majesty. It was not recognized that the free- 
 dom of detachment is the freedom of caprice 
 and helplessness ; and 'awe,' which has nothing 
 
 ___.^ reltgious'ln it, was confused with 'reverence.' 
 
 *j;<t^'icm(, ijp ^jj(j go long as the only function of society 
 ^. ' was to let man be, or to ' interfere ' only to 
 
 \tc.^LH' 
 
 Su) <f\-n. C((X.iHf^ 
 
 .^ ^^^ protect his exclusive rights, the laws of social 
 ^ life were intelligible and the path of the legis- 
 
 . co^r. 
 
 uL-c 
 
 , n |- ;;r^^^.lator plain. In all of these regions of man's 
 
 K life there were higher agencies at work than he 
 
 '^ recognized in his theories. His actual freedom 
 
 ,coli-,e'> --- was not merely capricious; his obedience to 
 
 duty was not merely servile ; trust and love 
 
 mingled with his awe ; and social filaments so
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 239 
 
 bound him to his neighbours that his egoism 
 was frustrated and rebuked on every hand. 
 Still the last theoretic word as to nature was^\ 
 not unity but difference ; as to freedom was 
 detachment and caprice; as to society was the 
 individualistic independence of those who were 
 aggregated within it ; and as to God was a 
 sovereign will, which dealt with nature, and 
 saved or reprobated men according to His own 
 'good pleasure.' 
 
 Now all is changed, for the spirit of man is 
 changed — changed much more profoundly than 
 his circumstances and the conditions of his outer 
 life upon which we are prone to fix our gaze ; 
 for these latter issue from the former even while 
 they react upon them. Belief in the unity of 
 the natural universe, including man, is now 
 practically universal in civilized communities. 
 There are neither interstices nor rifts ; there are 
 no causes without natural consequences, and no 
 effects without natural and necessary antece- 
 dents — no mere accidents anywhere. The 
 whole scheme is compact, and man is a part of 
 it. His psychical nature is inextricably inter- 
 
 1/.«>^ /
 
 240 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 twined with' his bodily frame ; he is not spirit 
 plus soul, plus body ; but spirit, soul and body 
 interfused; a sensuous-rational being, continuous 
 with the world in which he lives. All being is of 
 one tissue. What, then, of man's moral nature 
 and the freedom which it implies ? The freedom 
 of detachment is no longer possible, for there is 
 no detachment. Where all things fall into one 
 scheme, and are by their very nature compacted 
 together in one indiscerptible whole, the whole 
 appears to be the only agent, and no action can 
 be attributed to the parts and elements except 
 as instruments of that whole. The plant lives 
 and grows because the whole world with its cir- 
 cling seasons at once conspires to help and fails 
 to frustrate it. Of separate action of its own, 
 of action which is not interaction but isolated 
 and genuinely originative, there is none. And 
 in his isolation is man anything better : or does 
 not he not sink into a mere name for that which 
 can not for a moment be ? The problem of his 
 freedom has become more difficult. Nay, it is 
 insoluble, except at the cost of reinterpreting 
 both man and his environment. 
 
 I
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 241 
 
 And once we recognize the unity of the 
 natural universe and regard it as a closed 
 system, what becomes of that world beyond 
 upon which men had fixed their better hopes ? 
 By what apertures can its influences flow into a 
 system which is all compact ? ' The ranks of 
 science have closed ' and the supernatural has 
 been shut outside. It has become an empty and 
 impotent region. No God dwells therein who 
 can be known of man. Nor can he miraculously 
 intervene to help except by some suspension or 
 change of the whole scheme. The Deism, which 
 witnessed to a God benevolent but remote, has 
 no defence whatsoever against the Agnosticism 
 which dares not aflirm and the Scepticism which 
 must deny. Belief in such a God has perished 
 of inanition, which is the most complete of all 
 refutations. But what other God is possible ? 
 Once more the alternatives are those of complete 
 negation or a new interpretation. 
 
 When we contemplate man, not merely as a 
 part of a natural scheme but as a moral and 
 religious being, the difliculties deepen further. 
 There is a sense in which man's destiny as a
 
 242 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 spiritual agent has always seemed hard and 
 incongruous. He is a victim of time inflicted, 
 and yet glorified, with aspirations which are 
 more than temporal. His ends are beyond his 
 achievements, his purposes exceed his means, 
 and failure is written on every page of his 
 history to the last line. Such is his record at 
 the best : he cannot count that he has ' attained.' 
 At the worst his life is mean, and sinful, and 
 wretched and very brief — his better purposes 
 abandoned, his aspirations stifled and the light 
 of his soul well-nigh gone out. But the situa- 
 tion was not intolerable under the ancient 
 scheme. God might interfere and obtrude upon 
 man's sin and misery the sovereign hand of 
 mercy, and by a miraculous gift of grace, all 
 undeserved and without leverage in man him- 
 self, lift him above it all. The thoughts of men 
 were satisfied even though that grace was not 
 given to all. For was not the sovereign will 
 benevolent in that it gave to many, and did not 
 justice deal with what remained ? The artificial 
 scheme was fit to cope with the artificial circum- 
 stances.
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 243 
 
 Now it is all obsolete : we reject both the 
 scheme and the situation which it was meant to 
 meet. Man's view of his own nature has changed. 
 He is not vile by constitution, but by the viola- 
 tion and distortion of it; and the ideals which he 
 never fully attains are nevertheless the operative 
 powers of his life and his most essential being. 
 His sense of brotherhood has been widened, and 
 his consciousness of the solidarity of his kind ; 
 and his yearning now is for the race. Moralized 
 himself, he moralizes the object of his adoration. 
 The sovereign will which knows no law save its 
 own caprice is not divine. Love is paramount, 
 and justice is its instrument. The ' Moral 
 Governor ' has become ' Our Father,' and His 
 destiny is one with our own. Our final failure 
 were His failure. Miraculous interference has 
 been transmuted into a constant law ; for God 
 dwells in man, a Presence which never fails, 
 a free Ideal always operative. 
 
 But if we thus identify the destiny of man 
 with God's and make ' our salvation sure,' is not 
 the converse also true ? The evils of the world 
 and the sinfulness of man are real : does God,
 
 244 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 then, manifest Himself in these ? If He is at the 
 heart of man's volition when man does the right, 
 is He absent when man sins ? The doctrine of 
 the immanence of God and of the universality of 
 his all-loving will has shed a broader and more 
 generous light upon man's fate ; but the difficul- 
 ties which it brings are all too obvious. The 
 evils of the world thrown upon such a back- 
 ground cast a deeper shadow : for God parti- 
 cipates therein. We find thoughtful men in 
 these days, resolved to face facts rather than 
 to obscure their vision with pious insincerities, 
 refuse to admit that the Being who manifests 
 Himself in this misery- stricken world and in 
 the sin -stained life of man can be all-powerful 
 and all-benevolent too. They limit Him : He 
 is tainted with the finitude in which He dwells. 
 'The Moral Governor,' the 'Sovereign Will' that 
 out of its own good pleasure called the universe 
 into being and then let it go, sat aloof and was 
 not contaminated ; but we speak of a ' Presence 
 deeply interfused'; and are, as it seems to many, 
 constrained to choose between the testimony of 
 the moral consciousness to the reality of the
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 245 
 
 difference between good and evil, and the testi- 
 mony of the rehgious consciousness to the per- 
 fection of the God in whom it would find rest. 
 The conceptions of the Idealist have served to 
 make the contradictions of man's experience hold 
 up a more intractable front. 
 
 The same cause, bringing similar results, is 
 seen to be operative when we consider our present 
 attitude towards the history of mankind. A 
 little while ago, good men — men of learning and 
 reflexion, of deep piety and sincere human 
 sympathy, entertained without dissent or recoil 
 the conception of the partial rule of a beneficent 
 providence in human history. They could toler- 
 ate the notion that there was one small people 
 elect, living on the shores of the Mediterranean 
 Sea, whose history alone was sacred, and who 
 were the object of divine care and love. All 
 the other nations of the world were beyond His 
 ken — or worse, they were objects of His undying 
 wrath. The belief is obsolete. It serves now but 
 to illustrate the tyrannic power of theological 
 schemes, and to show how slowly men arrive at 
 a universal love of their kind, and how surely
 
 246 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 are their own defects reflected in the God they 
 worship. 
 
 By a process unmarked, like the circling of the 
 wintry earth towards the spring, we find our- 
 selves in a more genial spiritual atmosphere. 
 We know now, or at least we ought to know 
 decisively, that such conceptions of God are 
 unworthy of Him and of ourselves. All history 
 is sacred, the object of a love that is not limited 
 nor partial and of a care which is not inter- 
 mittent — or none of it is sacred. God is every- 
 where, sustaining by His Holy will and unfailing 
 loving-kindness the tottering footsteps of all 
 mankind in its toilsome ascent towards its native 
 spiritual altitude, — or He is no-where, and there 
 is no God. But how, we ask, with deeper 
 and much more tragic doubt, can we find Him 
 everywhere ? What kind of faith can sustain the 
 appallingly pathetic scene which history presents 
 — of men all on their way to the long silence and 
 yet at strife, strenuously urgent on idle ends ; 
 strife without limit except for their little means, 
 without break except for the brittle brevity of 
 their lives, and often without mercy ; strife for
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 247 
 
 that which does not satisfy and whose attainment 
 is not seldom mere loss ? 
 
 It is not possible to survey these phenomena 
 and still ask whether doubt has deepened : nor 
 is it possible to be oblivious of the cause. The. 
 deepened doubt is the natural consequence of our 
 spiritual growth. It is a law in man's affairs 
 that new triumphs shall bring new tasks. Every 
 advance in intellectual development reveals new 
 and greater difficulties to solve — greater pro- 
 blems for wider minds. Moral progress means 
 larger responsibilities and harder duties ; and 
 every step in the broadening of sympathy brings 
 new suffering. By uniting nature to man, man 
 to man, and all with God Idealism has involved 
 all that exists, or that man can conceive, in 
 one doubtful destiny. There is no picking of 
 footsteps any more, nor wary walking amidst the 
 distinctions of artificial schemes : the whole web 
 has been torn. There is no salvation now by par- 
 tial issues; the question of the rectitude and sanity 
 of the whole order of reality has been raised, and 
 there remai n but two alternatives — hope which 
 cannot despair, or despair which cannot hope.
 
 248 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 I am aware that there are hybrid schemes 
 which attempt to justify the avoidance of these 
 ultimate issues, and I must say a word or two 
 of them in passing. I have referred already to 
 their characteristic method : they compromise 
 the order of nature saying that it holds only in 
 parts, or at least that we have no evidence for 
 more than a partial order. They compromise 
 the infinitude of God on similar grounds ; for we 
 have evidence neither of His omnipotence nor of 
 His absolute goodness, but only of His striving 
 against the evil which He has lacked the effective 
 will to overcome, or to prevent from existing at 
 all. 
 
 These theories appeal to ' common sense ' and 
 make it their prime merit to take facts as they 
 stand, viewing them through no distorting prin- 
 ciple, whether optimistic or pessimistic. And 
 on the whole they are pleasing to common 
 sense ; for ' common sense ' is suspicious of 
 rigorous methods and avoids extremes. It even 
 prides itself upon its superiority to logical neces- 
 sities, as if it were a merit of experience that it 
 should be not merely varied in content, but in-
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 249 
 
 consequent. And common sense, making no 
 pretension to coherence is pardonable enough, 
 even though it plumes itself upon its chief 
 defect. But a philosophy has no such defence ; 
 a theory cannot take refuge behind its own. in- 
 coherencies. Its appeal is to awakened reason, 
 which assumes that where there is incongruence 
 there is falsehood, and which must restore the 
 order of experience. But these theories fail to 
 satisfy reason. Their compromise amounts to 
 nothing more than the restatement of the diffi- 
 culties demanding to be solved. For they will 
 prove to be sceptical or the reverse according as 
 the accent is allowed to fall upon the defects of 
 the object with which they deal — be it nature 
 or God — or upon the criterion by reference to 
 which the defects are exposed. These Pluralists 
 and Pessimists have in themselves something 
 that is superior to what they condemn — a stan- 
 dard by which the world is found to lack order, 
 and God perfection. / 
 
 But, further : it ought to be evident to philo"\^ 
 sophers that an objective order which holds only 
 here and there implies principles which are true
 
 250 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 only now and then. But such principles are as 
 impossible in ethics or physics as they are in 
 mathematics. There are facts whose law we 
 have not been able to discover ; but to say that 
 there are facts to which no law applies is to say 
 that there are facts which have no nature of 
 their own ; for the nature of a thing is its law . 
 To deny or to doubt the universality ofjaw is 
 therefore to deny or to doubt whether a thing 
 is always itself; and to deny or to doubt the 
 order of reality as a whole is to dissolve the 
 objects of which the order consists, and to leave 
 nothing the same with itself. 
 
 Not less evident is it that a God who is not 
 infinite but limited is a God who is neither 
 self-subsistent nor self-determined. If he acts 
 it is only under conditions which he has not 
 called for, and he operates upon an environment 
 over which he has not complete control. He 
 owes his being to the causation of a prior and 
 presumably a higher power. Manifestly, there- 
 fore, the name ' God,' which is just our name for 
 what we deem to be in itself all in all, must be 
 transferred to that higher power, or to some
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 251 
 
 whole which is self-sustained and self-deter- 
 mined. And these theories succumb to this 
 necessity. There is an absolute above their God ; 
 or a companionship of spirits which is greater 
 than himself, and of which he is an important 
 member, and nothing more. 
 
 Such methods of compromise, which apply 
 principles only up to a certain point and then 
 stop short, are not able to stand the strain 
 of man's awakened thought. Science demands 
 categorically that a law shall apply universally 
 to the matter to which it is relevant — and, of 
 course, that it should hold of other matter is 
 absurd. Philosophy has no function, nay, it is 
 aware that the mind of man can not act, except 
 on the supposition that the nature of things 
 must be constant — whether that nature be static 
 or in flux, and that they cannot be other than 
 themselves. Theories to which the order of the^''^^^ 
 universe is tentative, transfer the defects of 
 man's knowledge to its object, destroying both. 
 Those which maintain that the order is only in 
 the making — God and man striving with limited 
 though unequal powers to bring that order about
 
 252 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 — look for an issue for which they deny a cause : 
 for the order is said to be in the making, while 
 there is neither in God nor in man aught ade- 
 quate to make it. Theories which isolate objects 
 from one another and set up a pluralism, must 
 either deny the need of connexions, or admit 
 that they are at once necessary for knowledge 
 and fictitious — fabrications of the mind, which 
 mind knows to be fabrications and still employs. 
 But ' Falsehood, be thou my Truth 1 ' like * Evil, 
 be thou my Good ! ' is a maxim for the phantom 
 ruler of the phantom realm of chaos. And 
 ' conceptions which are valid but not true ' are 
 amongst the oddest inventions of philosophers in 
 distress. 
 
 Not by such halting means as these can the 
 problems of the modern spirit be solved. Men 
 in earnest with thought, like men in earnest 
 with life, are thrown back upon absolute alter- 
 natives. Their instances are crucial. They test 
 their colligating hypotheses by them, and the 
 failure of these hypotheses is the dissolution of 
 their world, the loosening of the bonds of its 
 rational order, and the destruction of all its parts.
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 253 
 
 Nor is it in the province of theory only that^ 
 men try the very fibre of reality by individual 
 instances. We see the test applied sometimes 
 by very humble minds which make pretence to 
 no philosophy. Let tragedy come in its power to 
 an y man, and he will ask ultimate questions. 
 Bereaved by death of the object of their 
 supremest love, foiled of the purpose that gave 
 value to their lives, or conscious of the deep stain 
 of some ill-deed repented of but now beyond 
 recall, and working out in the lives of others 
 its fell consequences, and finding no healing for 
 their woe, men despair of more than themselves. 
 They despair of the whole extent of being ; they 
 disbelieve in God. The ultimate alternatives 
 arise in their souls, and they say : ' Either this 
 evil does not stand final and irremediable, but 
 will yet be over-taken and over-come, or the 
 whole scheme of things is evil ' : either ' God's in 
 His heaven,' or there is only Destiny, which has 
 neither a heart to pity nor eyes to see : either 
 ' the world is no blot nor blunder, but means 
 intensely and means good,' or it is ' Void of 
 Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility :
 
 254 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-Engine, 
 rolling on, in its dead indifference to grind me 
 limb from limb.'^ 
 
 ' A hasty generalization,' the man at ease will 
 say ; ' the shadow of a disappointed ego cast 
 across the broad universe ; the whole world 
 condemned because it will not butter our bread.' 
 ' A valid generalization all the same,' I would 
 answer. Under the conditions stated no other 
 is possible. The nature of things is evinced in 
 every one of its elements, and the fate of the 
 whole is at stake in all its particulars. There 
 is only one proviso, namely, that the instances 
 shall be genuinely crucial. What, then, makes 
 an instance crucial ? Simply that it is relevant 
 to the o;eneral law or that its nature is known. 
 And it is just the feature of these superlatives 
 of thought and emotion that their instances are 
 postulated as crucial. When man is tried to 
 the uttermost the ultimate hypotheses upon 
 which his life rests are in question. They are 
 his ideals, without which his life would have 
 neither meaning nor value. And the validity 
 
 ^ Sartw Resurius, 'The Everlasting No.'
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 255 
 
 of his ideals implicate his world. For the soul 
 of man, however buffeted aud foiled, is beut 
 upon perfection, and he can tolerate nothing 
 less in his ideals which express that perfection. 
 So long as he retains his ideals the worst has 
 not come : but when they fail his powers 
 collapse, for he has neither standing place nor 
 fulcrum. His whole universe is a bottom- 
 less quagmire and there is no safe footing 
 anywhere. 
 
 Man is never at his best or highest except 
 when he is in touch with ultimate^ issues. The 
 scope of earnest doubt and of earnest faith are 
 coextensive. And there is perhaps no surer 
 evidence of the value of the Idealism of these 
 days — whether we consider the implied Idealism 
 of the sciences, the imaginative Idealism of the 
 poets, the Idealism of faith which religion brings 
 or of assured knowledge which philosophy seeks 
 — than that it has contributed to bring us to 
 confront these issues. The very postulates of 
 our life are now upon their trial : of knowledge, 
 because the alternatives are the order and the 
 rationality, or the disorder and irrationality of
 
 256 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 the world, which is its object ; of morality, 
 because they are the possibility or the impossi- 
 bility of human freedom ; of religion, because 
 they are the existence and the immanence, or 
 the non-existence of God. Adapting the words 
 of Carlyle to our age, we may say that ' The 
 Everlasting No has pealed through all the 
 recesses of its spirit.' The compromises of the 
 ancient creeds avail no more. 
 
 But it is often assumed that in these ultimate 
 matters of universal denial or universal affirma- 
 tion in knowledge, of freedom or necessity in 
 the sphere of morals, and of faith or unbelief in 
 that of religion, the choice is a matter of tem- 
 perament and not of reason. Set between these 
 opposite poles, the mind of man, we are told, 
 is helpless ; because both alike lie beyond our 
 experience, and, indeed, are nothing more than 
 fictions of abstract thought. What experience 
 yields always and to all men is neither absolute 
 law nor the utter absence of it; neither unlimited 
 freedom nor universal necessity ; neither com- 
 plete knowledge nor utter ignorance ; and in 
 religion, at the best,
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 257 
 
 ' We stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
 And gather dust and chaff, and call 
 To what we feel is Lord of all, 
 And faintly trust the larger hope.' 
 
 It is true that we may cull either the white 
 or the black in this grey world of ours. We 
 may insist on the discontinuity of things, the 
 contingency of events and their apparent law- 
 lessness ; upon the errors and limitations of 
 our intelligence ; and upon the wrongs and 
 suffering of the world— for they are all real. 
 Then Scepticism and Pessimism ensue. On the 
 other hand we may fix our attention on the 
 evidences of order and law, on the triumphs 
 of the intelligence, on the joys of life and on 
 our wider outlook. Then religious and moral 
 faith ensue and the Optimism which they imply. 
 But we actually experience none of these pure 
 qualities ; and all of them alike are incompatible 
 with our real life, in which knowledge is con- 
 tending with ignorance, freedom with necessity, 
 good with evil, and faith with doubt. And man 
 in all his thinking must sustain himself upon 
 experience ; for beyond experience is the realm 
 of the imaginary, where all affirmations and
 
 258 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 negations have equal value, and therefore none 
 at all. 
 
 Besides, these opposites are correlative, and 
 they exist only in and through their mutual 
 'reference. Knowledge implies ignorance, for 
 truth is concord with reality and therefore 
 implies their difference. Morality implies a 
 distinction between ' what is ' and ' what ought 
 to be ' ; for it is a process of raising the former 
 into harmony with the latter, of making the 
 actual ideal, or the ideal actual. If they coin- 
 cided morality would have no place or function. 
 Hence good implies evil, and cannot exist apart 
 from its possibility. In a similar way the 
 finite and dependent and necessitated both 
 implies and is implied by the infinite, the 
 self-determined and the free. And Nature and 
 Spirit are correlates ; for the sphere of Nature, 
 however imperfectly known, is still the object 
 with which knowledge strives, and Spirit without 
 its object would be inert. 
 
 Both of these objections are held to paralyse 
 Idealism, and every other form of Monism that 
 would make all things of one tissue. You must
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 259 
 
 pardon me if in dealing with these objections I 
 must try your patience for a little ; for they are 
 evidently vital and they are much in vogue. / 
 
 I wish to admit the objections so far as to give 
 our opponents the full benefit of them. But I 
 would hold them to their objections, and by ' 
 doing so, I believe, show that the despairing 
 conclusions which they draw from them are 
 erroneous. 
 
 First, then, as to the contention that we have 
 no experience of absolute knowledge, or absolute 
 ignorance; of absolute good or absolute evilj,,.-''- Uvs£r*u*l 
 but that all we know and all we do is in^peffect : l^^^ -uob ^ u 
 never the pure beam, but a^^jrii^rture of shine f^-'-^ ■yy^'^^ 
 and shade. I grant that we have no experience '^^'^^ ^"^ 
 of them. I grant also, nay I insist, that where^ -^ ^ 
 experience gives no guidance reason is helpless. ^^^ ^^/^ .'> 
 Indeed, reason is nothing but organized experi- <- cv^/V «•>«_- 
 ence seeking truth. Not being objects of our^^"^"^ 
 experience, we must conclude that these pure 
 contrasts are fictions, products of an imagination 
 which first abstracts, and then gives a false 
 reality to its abstractions. It follows that we 
 must simply set them aside, and refuse to deal
 
 260 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 with them: just as a mathematician would refuse 
 to deal with an imaginary region where twice 
 two makes ninety-one, or where all the triangles 
 are circles. But it follows further — and this our 
 critics have not observed — that it is no defect of 
 reason not to be able to deal with such recognized 
 fictions ; and that its failure to give a rational 
 preference--to-on« ficLioir-over another can not 
 ^^..--'ibe^ made a charge against reason. AVe should 
 '-f- not applaud the reason of the mathematician 
 
 ^ "^ ^ "^ i2.-v <^ ^Y^Q preferred a geometry in which all circles 
 we^£-el> l^ are squares to a geometry in which all circles 
 i^^li!^ are triangles. Between fictions there can be no 
 
 rational choice. Idealism is concerned vitally in 
 showing that we learn through error, and find 
 /^o*.^ *- tv/,v 'through evil that good is best'; but it is not 
 concerned with what would take place in an 
 imaginary realm where knowledge and goodness 
 have no possible opposites. It abides by experi- 
 ence, and demands from reason no irrational 
 choice. 
 
 Secondly as to the vital correlation of the 
 opposites that fall within experience. We are 
 told that they cannot be except in their contrast,
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 261 
 
 for each term implies its opposite. Be it so 1 
 I accept the objection, but, I insist once more 
 that they who make it shall abide Ijy it. As 
 these opposites cannot exist except in mutual 
 reference, seeing that when severed they become 
 fictitious unrealities and that they are presented 
 to us in all our experience only in their correla- 
 tion ; then let us deal with them in their 
 correlation. But this means that we shall deal 
 neither with the one nor with the other, but 
 with their unity . We deal, in other words, with 
 what transcends their opposition ; nay, with that '^- '^o^^'^^cJ:^" 
 which in our own experience transcends their 
 opposition — for, we are told, we experience 
 naught ejse. But, what becomes, then, of that 
 ultimate failure which obstructs God, and that 
 irremediable evil which limits His infinitude, and 
 . ^ condemns the universe to a vain struggle that 
 *^'''*''6an never end? Manifestly we cannot treat the 
 a^t^tpain and wrong of the world and man's misery 
 and sin as final, and at the same time make 
 them relative to the good.v The critics of Ideal- 
 ism play fast and loose with their own premisses, 
 and according to the exigencies of the moment 
 
 
 Wft. W-v. 
 

 
 262 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 .~2) 
 
 
 V 
 
 /w 
 
 assert or deny the absolute opposition of good 
 and evil and of all the other opposites. 
 
 Still, it may be said, the crucial difficulty of 
 Idealism remains. IfJ^essimism and Scepticism 
 arerefuted.,,thr0ugli the reference of evil to good 
 afid^ignorance to knowledge, and necessity to 
 freedom, and finitude to the infinite, the opposite 
 affirmative of Idealism and Optimism is also 
 refuted. This objection also seems vital, and we 
 cannot pass it by. It seems to destroy the very 
 postulates of Idealism, and by another route to 
 negate the order of the world and the perfection 
 of God. 
 
 In order to deal with it let us return to the 
 presupposition upon which it rests, namely the 
 essential correlation of the opposites of experi- 
 ence, or, in other words, their existence only 
 within a unity which includes them both. That 
 unity must evidently be either some third thing 
 '(nvst^<ac4->^^^in which the opposites are transcended: some- 
 ■-J ^ ^y-^ thing which is beyond the contrast of science and 
 v«L •■ \r<x-vxj; v^ nescience, good and evil, freedom and necessity, 
 fr^!_ "J- finite and infinite being ; or, on the other hand, it 
 tryttc-u^ovs^xtri.^^^^ be one of these opposites themselves, which 
 
 f. 
 
 1A-V«-I^tuj 
 
 \i 
 
 O C.e-e)uVL 
 
 
 Uy &w«^ ( 
 
 u- 
 
 le_ -ikcUr Uc^ /Oe-cvw iT^e. A-cvi its^-v^ "- c'c^/^t-r
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 263 
 
 includes the other amongst its essential elements, 
 or manifestations, or stages, or functions, or 
 which presupposes it in some other way. There 
 are Idealists who have sought escape in the first 
 of these alternatives. They have spoken of God 
 as ' the unity beyond the difference of subject 
 and object' ; of an absolute whose knowledge is 
 intuitive and whose thought is creative and in 
 which the last contrast of truth and reality 
 disappears ; of a being to whom the opposition 
 of good and evil does not apply, for there is no 
 contrast between ' what is ' and * ought to be ' in 
 his activities, and who has therefore no moral 
 attributes. All the predicates of finite experi- 
 ence fall away ; attributes of finitude meet in 
 but are also transcended in the absolute, whom 
 therefore we cannot conceive. The absolute is 
 all in all : God is the sum of all perfections and 
 in Him all difierences are reconciled, but after 
 a manner which man can not conceive.^ 
 
 It would take us too far afield to endeavour 
 to examine this view. Nor is it necessary. It is 
 a manifest failure. A unity which in transcend- 
 
 ^ See Bradley's Appearance and Reality.
 
 264 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 ing the differences obliterates tliem is not their 
 unity. A unity which becomes itself unknow- 
 ;^ '^ able, or lies beyond the r each of_all predication, 
 
 '^^^^,"^'''^0-^^ holds no difference s together, but sinks itself 
 into an empty -tCmrmation of the all-in-allness of 
 everything. Nay, this attempt was foredoomed 
 to failure from the first : for no third thing can 
 ever unite. That which comes in as third is 
 but one difference more, demanding to be itself 
 reconciled with the other terms. What unites 
 must be an element of community in the things 
 united, and it must express itself in both. And, 
 finally, in professing to explain the antagonisms 
 of experience, this theory carries us beyond the 
 boundaries of all possible experience. We are 
 led into the realm of the void, where only the 
 unbridled imagination may roam on its empty 
 mission. 
 
 Thus there remains the second alternative: that 
 the unity in which the opposites of experience 
 meet is one of these opposites themselves. This 
 view, I believe, is true. That it brings grave j 
 difficulties of its own I am well aware : and even 
 if it is valid, it has to be verified, little by little,
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 265 
 
 by application to the fticts of man's intellectual 
 and spiritual experience, just like any other 
 principle. 
 
 But if certain assumptions are allowed to go 
 unchallenged it will at once appear to be false. 
 The first of these is the assumption that correla- 
 tives which imply each other so essentially that 
 they cannot exist except in mutual relation must 
 be in all respects upon a par. If A cannot exist 
 without B, nor B without A, then they are 
 equipollent. But this is not true, except in the \' 
 domain of simpler existence and simpler thought. 
 When we ascend to more complex objects, essen- 
 tial correlation is found to be compatible with 
 the dominance of one of the correlates. Environ- 
 ment and organism, object and subject, means 
 and purpose, are mutually implicative, but they 
 are not upon a par. And it is possible th^t^,e,'v^jr,,j.>v 
 error and truth, evil and good, necessity and 
 freedonT;~«<iture\iid spirit, the finite and infinite 
 are in like 5asS^>-<zL^ ^.^^"^"^"^^ ^f^a >v.«v.:.(*^e; 
 
 1-1. ttte uy a-^ e. 
 
 In the second pla,ce there are assumptions as 
 regards the nature of knowledge and of morality 
 which would destroy our hypothesis. It is
 
 .-^''^y 
 
 266 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 assumed as to knowledge that it is a process 
 of J^ringing differences into unity, of colligating 
 phenonienajnthemselyes. separate into coherent 
 systems, or, as we say, of applying universals to 
 particulars, or laws to facts. No Idealism is 
 possible on such terms. The speculations of 
 Kant have shown that such a view cannot escape 
 from the toils ofjiualism. But having accepted 
 the ol^eetion of the critics that unity and differ- 
 V^^r^"" ence, laws and facts, thought and its object 
 V cannot exist apart, and in themselves are mere 
 
 abstractions, the problem of bringing them 
 together cannot arise. To assume that such a 
 problem can arise is to resuscitate the abstrac- 
 tions which have been condemned. As to 
 morality, it-k assumed, in a similar way, that 
 it is a process of bringing ' that which is ' into 
 s^ (rvcvv^ c'vi.^ accord with ' that which ought to be,' or of 
 Iccfe-i^t irw/; raising the actual to the level of the ideal. And 
 >^&>vtj-t< aX2^ these are taken to be mere opposites and ex- 
 clusives. It is the contrast of what is actual, 
 and condemned as imperfect, with that which is 
 only a conception, and which is called good. 
 That is to say, what is actual is evil, and what
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 267 
 
 is good is unreal. But morality on such terms 
 is evidently both impossible and futile. There 
 can be no value in converting what is real into 
 a mere idea, for a mere idea, however noble, 
 has less worth than the crudest thing that is 
 actual. But this view also resuscitates the 
 exclusive alternatives already rejected : real 
 and ideal, good and evil, it has been agreed, 
 have no existence apart, and are mere 
 abstractions. 
 
 Further, the view represents both knowledge 
 and morality as radical modifications of the 
 order of the existing world. Knowledge is made 
 into a process of inventing relations between facts 
 given as isolated ; that is, it stultifies itself, for 
 by its very success it would represent the real in 
 a way in which it does not exist. Successful 
 knowledge results in a coherent system ; but the 
 facts it is meant to image, or to reproduce faith- 
 fully in thought, are assumed not to be members 
 of any system. Morality is made into a process 
 of projecting forth an ideal, and of in some way 
 making the actual agree with it. It demands a 
 change in the nature of what is real under the
 
 268 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 operation of that which is altogether alien : a 
 change which is possible only by a miracle. 
 
 Evidently, then, we must define our contrasted 
 terms in another way. The real which can ex- 
 press itself in systematic knowledge must itself 
 be a system, and not a collection of discrete 
 entities. The moral agent who can raise himself 
 and his world to the condition in which they 
 ' ought to be,' must contain the possibilities of 
 that change wdthin himself and find them also in 
 his world. Thus the opposition between the 
 actual and the ideal falls within the real : or in 
 other words, the actual which was condemned as 
 not in accord with what ' ought to be,' and 
 therefore evil, contains the possibility of its own 
 better state.^ Hence, knowledge and morality 
 do not seek to bring a new order of existence 
 into being. The former does not introduce 
 system into a chaotic agglomerate of phenomena, 
 nor does morality substitute a good universe for 
 a bad. Knowledge, in so far as it is valid, dis- 
 
 1 This implies that ' evil ' is dependent on ' good,' in a way in 
 which good is not dependent on evil : and that, in all the 
 opposites, the positive has deeper reality than the negative, and 
 gives it its significance.
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 269 
 
 covers the order already existent in the world ; 
 and a moral agent, in so far as his actions are 
 good, reveals the ideality of the world, recog- 
 nizing and obeying its laws and making himself 
 their willing instrument. In both these activities 
 man's function is repetitive : his thoughts and his 
 volitions, in so far as the former are valid and 
 the latter good, acquiesce in and reproduce the 
 objective order. He appropriates that order in 
 his personality, making his mind the mirror of 
 its truth and his will the instrument of its 
 purpose. And, moreover, it is only m this pro- 
 cess that the world appears as real and as good. 
 Man realizes himself by means of it, and it 
 reveals its nature by means of man. 
 
 I must dwell for a little upon this matter, for 
 it contains the essential message of Idealism. 
 
 It means that, both in his cognitive and in 
 his moral activities, man finds his ideals in the 
 world. That this is true as regards knowledge 
 is easily seen. The universe as it stands is 
 manifestly the criterion of man's cognitive attain- 
 ments. No one ever sought other knowledge 
 than the knowledge of that wdiich is. To seek
 
 270 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 false knowledge, that is, knowledge which did 
 not accord with, or express that which is real, 
 were absurd. Hence every effort after a rational 
 interpretation of reality, which knowledge is, 
 proceeds on the assumption that the reality to 
 be interpreted is itself rational. Reason refuses 
 to deal with what is irrational ; for instance, no 
 mathematician will try to prove that the three 
 angles of a triangle are together equal to three 
 right angles, nor will a physicist seek to invent 
 a perpetually moving machine. It is only 
 because the world is believed to have meaning 
 that we seek to spell out its cryptogram : were 
 we persuaded that it has no meaning our intelli- 
 gence could not occupy itself with it in any way. 
 The scepticism which denies the objective order, 
 or the rationality of the world, destroys the 
 occasion for knowledge : and is, of course, incon- 
 sistent with itself But even to the sceptic the 
 world is the standard of truth : for he assumes 
 that he has grounds for his assertion of its dis- 
 continuity and irrationality, and these grounds 
 are in that world itself. Thus, whether we seek 
 to know that which is real or despair of knowing
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 271 
 
 it, it remains the criterion of our intellectual 
 attainment or failure: the world as it is is the 
 ideal of knowledge, whether we deem that we 
 can attain the ideal or not. 
 
 But to say that the world as it stands fur- 
 nishes the ideal and the criterion of the moral 
 life may well seem to be nothing better than 
 wanton paradox : so obvious is it that the very 
 nisus of that life is the conviction that things 
 are not as they ought to be and must be 
 changed. Nevertheless, I believe it can be 
 shown that upon no other assumption is the 
 moral life possible ; and that in this respect our 
 moral is strictly parallel with our intellectual 
 life. As we do not create the objective world 
 in knowing it, so we do not create the moral 
 world by our moral action. The process of 
 morality is a process of interpretation, of obedi- 
 ence, and of the appropriation of that which is, 
 and which is deemed right or good. As we 
 wrong the world by assuming that it awaits the 
 systematizing activity of our intelligence in order 
 to escape from a condition of chaotic discon- 
 nectedness; so also we wrong the world of
 
 272 IDEAIJSM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 morality by assuming that it waits upon our 
 activity to introduce into it a law of righteous- 
 ness to which it is itself foreign/ As in know- 
 ledge we strive to interpret and simply to accept 
 the rational order without disturbing it by any 
 prejudices of our own, and as all our activity 
 consists in widening our capacities to the measure 
 of its being — throwing open the windows of the 
 soul ; so is it in morality. Its aspiration is also 
 after concord with everlasting law, and its prayer 
 is ' Thy will be done.' 
 
 Thus, in both cases it is presumed that the 
 ideal is real, and the real ideal ; and that our 
 one mission as spiritual beings is to make this 
 presupposition good within ourselves in actual 
 experience. We may think meanly enough of 
 our own acquirements : our knowledge may fail 
 on every hand and our righteousness be ' as 
 filthy rags ' ; but the goal on which our souls are 
 set, however hopelessly, is nothing less than 
 perfection. Indeed, our very despair is but an 
 indication of our belief in the Truth and Good- 
 
 ^ This was the error exjDOsed by Hegel in the theory of Kant, 
 who represented the moral world merely as what ' ought to be,' 
 and therefore as a mere conception projected into the empty sky.
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 273 
 
 ness, which we fail to attain ; and it is in their 
 presence that we discover our littleness. At the 
 very heart of our spiritual activities there thus 
 remains an indomitable Optimism, which the 
 religious consciousness calls 'trust in God.' The 
 universe, which is the object of our rational 
 intelligence and will, stands forth justified. 
 Knowledge and morality imply their ' absolute,' 
 no less than religion. 
 
 It is the ignorant and the capricious spirit 
 that finds the universe unsatisfactory. It is 
 the first view which represents it as shallow in 
 meaning, poor in content, given over to accident, 
 a mysterious object of dread and superstition, 
 and limited in its use and beneficence. When 
 science and philosophy come, superseding the 
 sane for the savage outlook, they teach us 
 better. They reveal the order of its events, 
 the inexhaustible significance of its facts, and 
 the unlimited serviceableness of its compre- 
 hended laws. And the education and emanci- 
 pation of the will brings about the same change 
 in our view of what is real. Thp world frustrates 
 caprice ; it is obdurate against selfishness ; it
 
 
 
 ;i^^^V 
 
 v^^ 
 
 , 
 
 ■^ ■' yy 
 
 5- 9' 
 
 
 
 .^ 
 
 
 274 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 will never satisfy the egoist, nor give rest to 
 the ill-doer. He is hurled on from disappoint- 
 ment to disappointment. ' To look through the 
 shows of things, he is led and compelled.' 
 Before there can be peace he must accept their 
 laws, negate his own caprice, and annihilate his 
 greed. ' Everywhere do the shows of things 
 oppress him, withstand him, threaten him with 
 fearfullest destruction : only by victoriously 
 penetrating into things themselves can he find 
 peace and a stronghold.' ^ In understanding 
 and accord with the objective order is all his 
 good, for it is to him ideal. The kingdom of 
 heaven is here ; let us but open the avenues of 
 our souls to welcome it. It is pressing upon 
 us at each moment. The rich world of nature 
 and of human history is offering to us the 
 treasures of its meaning with a constant urgency. 
 ' Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto 
 night sheweth knowledge ; there is no speech 
 nor language where their voice is not heard.' 
 It is inviting our comprehension, exciting our 
 thoughts by its changes, disturbing our indiff'er- 
 
 v'^J^^^C' ^Sartor Resartus^ 'Pause.' 
 
 Af^
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 275 
 
 ence and stagnation by its surprises ; it rewards 
 our attainments such as they are, and punishes our 
 follies and wrongs. What more can the environ- 
 ment do for spirit ? It cannot break into the 
 sanctum of its free activities without destroying 
 it : for knowledge given and not acquired, or a 
 moral good compelled, is a contradiction in 
 terms. The world must wait to be compre- 
 hended and obeyed in order to yield its over- 
 flowing beneficence ; and man must die to the 
 littleness of his own egoism in order to receive 
 it. ' Then are the mind's eyes unsealed, and its 
 hands ungyved ' ; and the scheme of things, 
 natural and spiritual, is found to be God's own 
 witness of Himself ' Nature, art not thou 
 the " Living Garment of God " ? Is it in very 
 deed He that ever speaks through thee : that 
 
 lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in 
 me.'^ 
 
 ' Thy voice is on the rolling air ; 
 
 I hear thee where the waters run; 
 Thou standest in the rising sun, 
 And in the setting thou art fair.' 
 
 Verily, it is raan who is in the making, and 
 
 ^ Ibid. 'The Everlasting Yea,'
 
 276 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 not the great Universe, nor his God. Philosophy, 
 in the excess of its subjectivity and diseased self- 
 consciousness, has been attributing the imper- 
 fections of man to the ideals which are the 
 objects he would know, and the laws he would 
 serve. It has denied the order of the universe, 
 or reduced its facts into mere phenomena, saying 
 that they are relative to man ; it forgets that 
 they are relative to man only because man is 
 relative to them, and subjects their permanence 
 to his flux, and their truth and goodness to his 
 errors and wrong-doing. In recent days, by the 
 same confusion, philosophy, or rather ordinary 
 opinion pretending to philosophize, has in like 
 manner been depriving God of His beneficence 
 and power, stultifying the very name in the 
 process. It has overlooked the contradiction of 
 its tenets which is discoverable in every soul 
 that seeks the truth or pursues the good,^ and 
 which seeks them only because it deems that they 
 
 1 And what man ever sought aught else ? Have you ever 
 known any one seek knowledge which is false ; or desire an 
 object because it is not good, in some poor sense or other of 
 the word ' good ' ? Can such be the motive of any action ? 
 Or does not even the soul that is in revolt and seeks death 
 rather than life, deem revolt and death its good ?
 
 I 
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 277 
 
 are there, eternally real in their own right, and 
 the very life of all its endeavours. The true and 
 the good shine, like the sun in the high heavens, 
 everlastingly, says Plato. Man dwelling in the 
 cave of his own ignorance, bound in the chains 
 of his own sensuousness, taking the shadows 
 thrown upon the furthest walls by the artificial 
 light of his own passions as realities, knows not 
 that they are there and rule the seasons, be- 
 getting light and life, till unwillingly, and with 
 many stripes, he is led up the difficult ascent 
 into the upper and open world. 
 
 I would fain end here, with the justification 
 of the Idealism which even our common know- 
 ledge and ordinary moral life thus furnish : for 
 no testimony can be stronger than that which 
 all experience proffers, or which, being false, 
 would render experience itself impossible — even 
 the failure of experience, no less than its success. 
 
 But I must illustrate this truth on the side 
 of our moral life, and then indicate and deal 
 with some of the many difficulties which critics 
 find in the doctrine. 
 
 If knowledge, instead of presuming the reality
 
 278 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 of its object and its rational meaning, changed 
 its object in the act of knowing it, as pheno- 
 menalists have maintained, it is plain that 
 knowledge would defeat itself by its very pro- 
 cess. If it must turn all things into appearances 
 and falsify them by its touch, it had better not 
 touch. The moral consciousness dissents against 
 the same subjectivity. So far from deeming 
 the moral world to be a thing to be made or 
 unmade, and its laws to be instituted or abro- 
 gated at his pleasure, the moral agent regards 
 them as standing above him in eternal majesty, 
 issuing imperatives of duty which are categorical 
 and claiming unconditional obedience. ' Duty ' 
 and ' moral good ' have no other meaning. 
 When man employs these conceptions, that is 
 when he discusses moral facts, he is investing 
 the moral world with absolute authority ; for 
 ' The Good ' carries within it its own justifica- 
 tion ; it exists in its own right and solely on its 
 own account.^ The recognition of it as good is 
 the acknowledgment of its complete autonomy 
 
 1 See the opening of Aristotle's Ethics ; or Kant's Orundlegung, 
 and Critique of Practical Reason.
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 279 
 
 and self-sufficiency. In obeying its behests the 
 moral agent is aware that he is bowing to a 
 necessity which is supreme, and whose claims 
 upon him are absolute, capable of no com- 
 promise, and abating nothing of their demands 
 for his weakness. Heaven and earth may pass, 
 but not one jot or one tittle of the law. It is 
 binding, as Kant says, on all rational beings ; 
 for it is the law of reason. Man's conception of 
 the good may be, and is, inadequate : its con- 
 tents appear only with the gradual evolution of 
 his own ethical capacities. But at every stage 
 it stands before him as absolute in its worth and 
 authority, a necessity he dare not question and, 
 in the degree to which he is moralized, does 
 not desire to question, but to obey. 
 
 But, on the other hand, his obedience to this 
 necessity which is absolute is free obedience ; 
 for he is obeying what he himself calls good, 
 what he himself approves. Hence he re-enacts 
 its behests, he reissues its laws from his own 
 conscience, and in submitting his life to their 
 guidance he is bowing to the dictates of his own 
 spirit ; nay he is rising to the height of his own
 
 280 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 most sacred desires. And this is freedom. It is 
 freedom in every highest and fullest sense : it 
 is freedom from inner constraint because ' duty ' 
 is recognized as good, and ' obligation ' as a 
 privilege and opportunity, and the service itself 
 as its own great reward ; it is freedom from 
 outer constraint, because the outer law and the 
 inner desire concur. There is nothing now to 
 frustrate his will, for ' the Good,' which is that 
 which exists in its own right and alone must be, 
 is on his side. 'I will walk at liberty, for I seek 
 thy precepts. ' ' I will delight myself in thy 
 commandments which I have loved.' 'Thy 
 statutes have been my songs in the house of my 
 pilgrimage.' ' In thy service is perfect freedom.' 
 Thus, therefore, does the moral consciousness 
 rise above the abstract opposition of law and 
 liberty, of necessity and freedom ; for the moral 
 life is both. It is at once obedience and auto- 
 nomy ; obedience that never questions nor 
 demurs, and which is at the same time the 
 joyous expression of the heart's own desire. In 
 the same way the opposition between the actual 
 and the ideal, and even the divine and the
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 281 
 
 human is sublated. The ideal, the divine, the 
 perfect good, is that which works in the moral 
 process and incites its activities. It is, in the 
 language of religion, the operative indwelling of 
 the Most High : necessity appearing as liberty, 
 the divine behest as free and joj^ous aspiration. 
 It is the best that the mind of man can imagine 
 or his heart desire, and that which gives worth 
 to all else. The good that is eternal becomes 
 the growing motive of his life ; the immortal 
 puts on mortality; God appears in the flesh, and 
 brings man back to Himself, freely, by perfect 
 acquiescence and joyous participation in His 
 ends. ' My meat and drink, is to do the will of 
 him that sent me, and to finish his work.' 
 Deprived of the opportunity of obedience, man 
 is deprived of all. His ideals are his life. 
 
 But why is obedience so hard, it is often 
 asked ? Why is the ascent to truth and good- 
 ness so diflicult ? Why must man war with his 
 ignorance, and his passions, suffering defeat so 
 often and gaining, at best, such poor victories ? 
 Why are his ideals so high and his achievements 
 so mean ? Why the suffering, and the sin and
 
 282 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 the failure ? Why is there process at all ? Why- 
 did not the good God send man forth from his 
 hand endowed with an intelligence which could 
 not err, and a will that could not transgress? 
 Why is his whole nature — his intelligence, will 
 and desires not firmly set, and his eyes alto- 
 gether open, to the good and the true ? 
 
 I cannot answer these questions. Philosophy 
 can furnish no answer, so far as I can see. But 
 I believe I can show that to be able to provide 
 no answer implies no defect on its part ; and 
 that it has a complete right to remain silent. 
 There are questions which ought to be neither 
 asked nor answered ; of which these are ex- 
 amples. There is a ' Why' which has no meaning. 
 If I may illustrate I may be able to persuade 
 you that I am not seeking merely to evade a 
 difficulty. The mathematician does not ask 'Why 
 one plus one makes two ' ; nor ' Why parallels 
 never meet. ' The physicist does not ask ' Why 
 bodies attract inversely as the square of their 
 distance'; or 'Why the planets move'; or ' Why 
 there is energy or space.' Nor does the Botanist 
 ask ' Why there are plants ' ; or ' Why plants
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 283 
 
 grow and die.' They ask 'How,' not 'Why.' 
 They seek to understand that which is ; not to 
 know ' why ' that which is exists. Their task is 
 not to go behind experience but to comprehend 
 what experience provides. And, dealing with 
 man's nature, intellectual or moral, the law of 
 procedure is the same. We take his nature as it 
 is presented to us, and we observe its activities. 
 For knowledge is the comprehension of what 
 exists, and not of that which possibly might be, 
 but is not. 
 
 In the next place, such questions as these are 
 in themselves irrational and self-contradictory. 
 When we ask why a thing is, or why an event 
 happens, we can reasonably desire only one 
 answer : namely, the knowledge of that ivitliin 
 experience which has produced the thing or 
 brought the event about. We seek in experi- 
 ence for the grounds of that which we desire to 
 explain. We endeavour to find a place for the 
 object in the system of reality as we know it. 
 But these questions as to a human nature which 
 we know does not exist demand that we should 
 find m experience reasons for that which, ex
 
 284 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 hypothesi, is not a part of experience. In 
 short, they deal with objects which belong to the 
 realm of mere imagination, within which, as we 
 have already seen, all affirmations and negations 
 have the same value, and therefore have no 
 value at all. 
 
 Hence, such demands can furnish no grounds 
 for bewailing the limitations of human reason ; 
 or for bowing the spirit in that awe which is not 
 reverence, before the mysterious ways of an un- 
 recognizable providence. It is not the refusal, 
 but the attempt to answer such questions as 
 these, which would prove the limitations of 
 reason ; for reason cannot be required to find 
 within experience the grounds of those things 
 which are not within experience. What is real 
 must contain the conditions of that which is 
 possible and of that which is necessary, as well 
 as of that which exists ; and it fixes their limits. 
 We cannot pass judgment upon the ivhole of 
 things except in its own light. The whole is 
 its own criterion ; and to appraise it by reference 
 to the possible which is impossible, because it 
 has no ground or root in that which is actual, is
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 285 
 
 an absurd procedure. There is no criterion for 
 knowledge save in the real, and there is need of 
 none. To comprehend it were to comprehend 
 all. Hence we can set these questions aside : 
 they arise from confusion of mind. 
 
 ' Still/ it may be legitimately answered, ' the 
 errors and sufferings and failure of man remain ; 
 and you postulate the immanence in all things 
 of a divine will, perfect in every might and 
 goodness. How can this be ? AVe admit that 
 the life of man expresses his nature as he 
 attempts to know the truth and to do the 
 right, and that he always seeks real truth and 
 goodness, and in that sense is set upon per- 
 fection ; hut he does not achieve. At the best 
 his life is only a process towards the true and 
 the good ; and process is the last word of his 
 history. Is not the permanent infected by the 
 incompleted process ; perfection by the imper- 
 fect ; the eternal good by the persistent evil ; 
 God by the unhappiness and sinfulness of the 
 world ? Hence, your Idealism cannot hold. 
 Nay, it is inconsistent with the spiritual achieve- 
 ment which it prizes as the best. For if " God
 
 286 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 is in His heaven and all's right with the world," 
 why need we strive or cry. We may go to sleep. 
 The moral process is unnecessary, and the moral 
 struggle is absurd. There is nothing to struggle 
 against except the shadows of our own errors, 
 and the delusions of our own minds, which, 
 refusing or ignoring the optimistic faith you 
 urge, falsely deem that the evils are real. There 
 is no worse enemy to morality than Optimism ; 
 for it stultifies all effort. If what ought to be 
 " already is," it is evident that there can be no 
 duties, and no aspirations, and nothing in need 
 of change. 
 
 Surely such a doctrine as this is nothing better 
 than a foul opiate which drugs man's spirit, 
 filling his mind during 'sin's drunken slumber' 
 with foolish dreams, and making him insensitive 
 to the woes of the world in which he lives, and 
 to the whole tragedy that never ceases to display 
 its horrors around him. The poisoned cup ought 
 to be struck from his lips. 
 
 This argument is much in vogue, and its logic 
 looks good. But let us test it. 
 
 First, reasonable as the consequences attri-
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 287 
 
 buted to moral and religious optimism seem to 
 be, experience does not support the deduction. 
 I have never known any man whose faith in the 
 ultimate victory of right over wrong, or whose 
 trust in God was great, lose ardour in the moral 
 struggle on their account, or become indifferent 
 to the suffering and sin of mankind. A Pantheism 
 which, in raising all things to the level of the 
 highest, degrades all things to the level of the 
 lowest, or which represents finite being as false 
 appearance and temporary show may have that 
 effect. But such a Pantheism is pessimistic at 
 the heart: it is Nihilism, for even its God is 
 without meaning. Christian faith has no such 
 effects. You will find St. Paul issue a challenge 
 'to tribulation and distress, and persecution, and 
 famine, and nakedness, and peril, and sword' and 
 death, and pronounce that ' in all these things 
 he was more than conqueror through him that 
 loved him'; and his ardour in the moral struggle 
 was not lowered thereby, nor his deep yearning 
 for the salvation of the sinful world. And the 
 latest of our great prophets shows the same 
 inconsequence — if inconsequence it be. When he
 
 288 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 arrives at the ' Everlasting Yea,' and not befo^^e, 
 we find him turn to his kind with ' infinite Pity, 
 infinite Love.' ' Poor, wandering, wayward 
 man ! Art thou tried, and beaten with stripes, 
 even as I am ? Ever, whether thou bear the 
 royal mantle or the beggar's gabardine, art thou 
 not so weary, so heavy-laden : and thy Bed of 
 Rest is but a Grave. my Brother, my Brother ! 
 Why cannot I shelter thee in my bosom, and 
 wipe all tears from thy eyes ? ' ^ ' The greatest 
 optimist the world ever saw was The Man of 
 Sorrows.' And what true follower of his was 
 not ' acquainted with grief,' or stood not long 
 in the ' Sanctuary of Sorrow ' ? These are they 
 who identify the fate of their erring fellows with 
 their own, and strive for their good as for their 
 own life : and in this consists their goodness. 
 Verily, it is not upon them that the evil of the 
 world sits lightly. They are ' wounded for our 
 transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, the 
 chastisement of our peace is upon them.' They 
 recognize the splendour of man's nature, and 
 how it is marred by ignorance and ill-doing. 
 
 ' Sartor Resartus, ' Everlasting Yea.'
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 289 
 
 The shadows are deep because they are thrown 
 upon the background of a great faith : faith 
 in man's nature, faith in the Universe which 
 encompasses man round about, faith in the God 
 who manifests Himself in both. What idle tale is 
 this that moral and religious Optimism brings 
 callousness towards evil and indifference to all 
 good ! 
 
 There is, indeed, an optimism, if it deserves 
 the name, which brings that consequence ; but 
 that is the unspiritual optimism of the satisfied 
 animal. Tliat optimism, however, is not in 
 question here ; our discussion is on another 
 plane. For to the animal nature there is no 
 sin, nor suffering save its own, nor pity for 
 marred possibilities. It nestles in unconscious- 
 ness, and knows nothing of the tragedy that 
 storms over-head in the world of moral right 
 and wrong into which it has no outlook. But 
 the critics of Idealism have overlooked the dis- 
 tinction, and employ the categories of natural 
 upon spiritual things. Do the windows of their 
 souls stand in need of being cleaned ? 
 
 Moral and religious optimism, nay even pes- 
 
 T
 
 290 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 simism, begins on another level. Religious faith 
 in God, moral trust and joy in the good imply a 
 negation and a devotion, even a death unto life, 
 which is the struggle and the victory. The pro- 
 cess, which from the merely natural point of 
 view is unnecessary and from the hedonistic 
 point of view is bad because it brings sympathy 
 and pain in the suffering of others, is from the 
 moral point of view the Supreme Good. Wher- 
 ever the tragedy lies, it does not lie in the moral 
 process, slow, and painful and costly as it is, 
 even the bearing of the cross on the way to the 
 death of the self, which is the hardest death of 
 all to meet. The process is even better than any 
 having attained, which we can experience ; for to 
 him who thinks that he has attained there is no 
 further knowing the true, or doing of the good. 
 But the good man does not desire to be out of 
 the service and to stand with idle hands. He 
 does not pray that evil may be forever, in order 
 to give him an opportunity for moral heroism; 
 but he does look to ' a growing splendour ever on 
 before,' which converts every attainment into the 
 stepping stone of a dead self, and which becomes
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 291 
 
 evil ODly if not made into a stepping stone. For 
 Jixed categories where ideals of a knowledge that 
 is true and of a goodness that is good, and in 
 that sense absolute, and are yet being gradually 
 realized, are as much out of place as ' natural ' 
 categories. Speaking of morality or of things 
 spiritual we must not forget their qualities. 
 Setting aside such non-moral presuppositions, 
 we shall not deem it necessary to pity those 
 who are on this pilgrimage, even though the 
 way is long, and they are often footsore and 
 heavy-laden. There is an alchemy in moral 
 goodness which turns even the sufferings of those 
 who suffer for its sake into a great joy. And if 
 there be any who would have the joy without 
 the suffering, the sympathy and pity, and love 
 without the woes, I can only say that they have 
 learnt neither the meaning of these things nor 
 their use ; and are once more forgetting the con- 
 ditions of the moral life and wandering into the 
 realm of the unreal. 
 
 But there are men, you urge, who are not on 
 this pilgrimage. They are not ' learning through 
 
 evil that good is best ' ; but hardening unto 
 
 t2
 
 292 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 crime, and descendiDg even deeper into aged 
 vice. AVell ! are there ? Are you veritably able 
 to judge, or had we not better, both sides alike, 
 abide the issue ? For, possibly, the end is not 
 yet. I am not persuaded that we are competent 
 to pass final judgment upon our fellows, even in 
 this world ; or have a right to say even of the 
 worst that ' the lamp of his soul is going out. ' 
 And beyond this life there is ' The Grand Per- 
 haps.' Browning, who had his own title to con- 
 jecture and was not without his insight in these 
 matters, dreams otherwise of the chief of his 
 array of sin-stained, unrepentant souls. The 
 ' Pope ' is condemning Guido to death on the 
 morrow, and these are his musings : 
 
 ' For the main criminal I have no hope 
 Except in such a suddenness of fate. 
 I stood in Naples once, a night so dark 
 I could have scarce conjectured there was earth 
 Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all : 
 But the night's black was burst through by a blaze — 
 Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore 
 Through her whole length of mountain visible : 
 There lay the city thick and plain with spires, 
 And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. 
 So may the truth be flashed out by one blow
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 293 
 
 And Guido see, one instant, and be saved. 
 
 Else I avert my face, nor follow him 
 
 Into that sad obscure sequestered state 
 
 Where God unmakes but to remake the soul 
 
 He else made first in vain ; which must not be.' ' 
 
 Mere guesswork and conjecture, I admit ; but 
 surely not more guess-work or conjecture than 
 the opposite view which ends all here, and makes 
 God fail. 
 
 There is one circumstance, indeed, w^hicli would 
 leave me with nothing to say ; and, so far as I 
 can see, destroy the hypothesis of my life. If 
 anywhere a man can be found who seeks no good 
 through his act or who seeks a false good because 
 of its falsity, then the Idealist, from Plato down 
 to this day, must hold out empty hands : 
 
 ' An infant crying in the night : 
 An infant crying for the light : 
 And with no language but a cry.' 
 
 But the whole experience of mankind furnishes 
 no such sample. Deeply as man has sinned, 
 preferring all manner of meanness to the glorious 
 service, that kind of preference he has never 
 made. Evil as evil, loss as loss, a worse because 
 
 1 The Ring avd the Book : 'The Pope.'
 
 294 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 it is worse, is not a possible motive for human 
 
 action. In every act, however low, or cruel, or 
 
 passionate, in every monstrous and defiant crime 
 
 that has raised its head against the high heavens, 
 
 the motive, if the act was conscious, that is, if 
 
 the man did it, was some foolish, confused, 
 
 tragical dream of something to be gained by it.^ 
 
 In speaking of man we must not forget the 
 
 qualities of man ; and such a man were not a 
 
 man. 
 
 'A monster, ... a dream, 
 A discord. Dragons of the prime 
 That tare each other in their slime. 
 Were mellow music match'd with him.'^ 
 
 Speaking of such a being, we are once more in 
 the region of conjecture, beyond the bounds of 
 experience ; and neither the instance nor the 
 criticism counts in rational argument. 
 
 But if it be true, as it seems it must, that 
 even in the drunken sleep of sin it is some foolish 
 dream of an impossible and misnamed good 
 
 1 Browning finds Miranda's suicidal leap the best thing that 
 
 remains for him. 
 
 ' Mad ! No ; sane, I say. 
 Such being the conditions of his life, 
 Such end of life was not irrational.' 
 
 2 Tennyson : In Memoriam.
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 295 
 
 which serves as motive, then there is hope. In 
 that case there is that in man which circum- 
 stance can foster, and feed into clearer flame : 
 there is the love of the good if he only could 
 recognize the good, which love can seize and use. 
 He may be enlightened yet ; for the conditions 
 are present. 
 
 ' Beneath the veriest ash there hides a spark 
 Which, quickened by love's breath, may yet pervade 
 
 the whole 
 O' the grey, and, free again, be fire ; of worth the 
 
 same, 
 Howe'er produced, for, great or little, flame is flame.' 
 
 What between the marvel of man's soul within, 
 the rational nature which cannot be put out and 
 leave him man, and the spinning wheel of cir- 
 cumstance without; what between the undying 
 need of good, the thirst that can not be slaked 
 by evil, and the great, rich, wondrous world 
 without to respond to it : I think that the 
 Idealist can hold to his hypothesis. There are 
 indeed innumerable cases in which his attempts 
 to apply his hypothesis may fail. But in this 
 respect his philosophy stands in like case with 
 all the sciences ; for in all of them there are
 
 206 IDEALISIM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 circumstances in which the surest hypotheses can 
 not be applied — as yet. But their application 
 is proceeding little by little ; and the hypotheses, 
 which are the surest knowledge that the sciences 
 have, become surer still as they bring fact after 
 fact within their sweep, and lodge them within 
 the system that stands through the equilibration 
 of its own elements. Such a hypothesis it seems 
 to me is that of the unity and the spiritual pur- 
 pose of the world — why indeed may 1 not call it, 
 the hypothesis of the Nazarene teacher as to the 
 nature of God ? And I believe it is the sanest 
 hypothesis that the mind of man has discovered 
 as yet.^ Tried, as it ought to be tried, by all the 
 tests which reason knows, without any longer 
 so disastrously seeking to shelter it behind the 
 bulwarks of authority or to defend it by any 
 method of casuistry, tried even as we try the 
 hypotheses of the natural sciences, it is possible 
 that it may be found to stand. Idealism seems 
 to do better justice to the meaning of the world 
 
 ^ If, as I have hinted, it is the condition of the possibility of 
 any experience, it is more than a hypothesis : it is an absolute 
 postulate.
 
 THE ANSWER OF IDEALISM 297 
 
 than Materialism ; Spiritual Monism than Plural- 
 ism. The idea of Order * works ' better than 
 Disorder ; of Law than Accident and Caprice ; of 
 God than Chance and Fate. It is a hypothesis 
 which distorts reality less; which finds reasonable 
 room for more of its facts ; which leaves over 
 fewer incoherencies ; which is less capable of 
 being convicted of inconsistency ; and which 
 does not forget Spirit, which alone is omnipresent 
 where truth is in question. And shall I be going 
 beyond the facts, think you, if I venture to say 
 that the experience of mankind is but a gradual 
 corroboration of its truth ? Man is discovering 
 his own nature, and where his true good lies, 
 through much failure and at a great cost ; he is 
 coming to himself through his intercourse with 
 his fellows and the world, and interpreting them 
 also in the process ; and the one discovery which 
 he is making, it seems to me, is that he is 
 spirit, — a mind set on knowing, and a will fixed 
 on Good and finding it, seek it where he will, 
 nowhere except in the things of the spirit ; that 
 the world is means set there for the uses of his 
 spirit, the possible content of his knowledge and
 
 298 IDEALISM AS A PRACTICAL CREED 
 
 law of his will and welfare ; and that in him and 
 it there is an ever-benevolent Presence inciting 
 him into Freedom, whom to know and to serve 
 is indeed happiness. 
 
 I believe the hypothesis is worthy of being 
 tried. Looking at the confused and tumultuous 
 and errant history of mankind, reading its mean- 
 ing where I can, and seeking within it for what 
 I would most desire to possess, or to be, or to 
 do, I can find nothing so noble, nothing I would 
 so willingly or gratefully make my inheritance 
 for ever as the example of those who have made 
 its light the guide of their faltering footsteps. 
 
 It is easy for me in closing to wish you well. 
 I cannot forget the greatness, and the difiiculties 
 of your enterprise — a new people amidst the 
 lonely silence of a vast continent. Material 
 prosperity you will attain, I have no doubt ; and 
 it is worth attaining. Perhaps power amongst 
 the nations of the world awaits you, which is 
 also worth attaining. But a kingdom founded 
 upon righteousness, a life amongst yourselves 
 sanctified in all its ways by this faith in man, 
 in the world and in God, is greater far than all
 
 THE AxNSWER OF IDEALISM 299 
 
 these things. I can form no higher wish for 
 you than that it may be your destiny to try 
 by actual experiment how far this faith of the 
 Idealists will stand the strain of a nation's 
 practice. 
 
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