animal; but he is an animal with a soul, and the sane view of him
takes both body and soul into account. The defect of a good deal of
current Realism lies in its lack of veracity; it is essentially
untrue, and it is, therefore, fundamentally unreal. The love of truth,
the passion for the fact, the determination to follow life wherever
life leads, are noble, artistic instincts, and have borne noble fruit;
but what is often called Realism has suffered quite as much as
Idealism from weak practitioners, and stands quite as much in need of
rectification and restatement.

The essence of Idealism is the application of the imagination to
realities; it is not a play of fancy, a golden vision arbitrarily
projected upon the clouds and treated as if it had an objective
existence. Goethe, who had such a vigorous hold upon the realities of
existence, and who had also an artist's horror of mere abstractions,
touched the heart of the matter when he defined the Ideal as the
completion of the real. In this simple but luminous statement he
condensed the faith and practice not only of the greater artists of
every age, but of the greater thinkers as well. In the order of life
there can be no real break between things as they now exist and things
as they will exist in the remotest future; the future cannot
contradict the present, nor falsify it; for the future must be the
realisation of the full possibilities of the present. The present is
related to it as the seed is related to the flower and fruit in which
its development culminates. There are vast changes of form and
dimension between the seed and the tree hanging ripe with fruit, but
there is no contradiction between the germ and its final unfolding.

A rigid Realism, however, sees in the seed nothing but its present
hardness, littleness, ugliness; a true and rational Idealism sees all