because they set the events of life in a fundamental order, and make
us aware of the finer potentialities of our race. They are Idealists
in the breadth of their vision and the nobility of the interpretation
of events which they offer us.




Chapter XXIII.

The Vision of Perfection.


These writers are also, by virtue of the faculty of discerning the
interior relations of appearances and events, the expositors of that
ultimate Idealism which not only discovers the possibility of the
whole in the parts, of the perfect in the imperfect, but which
discovers the whole, the complete and the perfect, and brings each
before us in some noble form. The reality of the Ideal as Plato saw it
is by no means universally accepted as a philosophical conclusion, but
all high-minded men and women accept it as a rule of life. Idealism is
wrought into the very fibre of the race, and is as indestructible as
the imagination in which it has its roots. Deep in the heart of
humanity lies the unshakable faith in its essential divinity, and in
the reality of its highest hopes of development and attainment. The
failure of noble schemes, the decline of enthusiasms, the fading of
visions and dreams which seemed to have the luminous constancy of
fixed stars, breed temporary depressions and passing moods of
scepticism and despair; but the spiritual vitality of the race always
reasserts itself, and faith returns after every disaster or