"You will hear every day around you," said Emerson to the divinity students
of Harvard, "the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that your first
duty is to get land and money, place and fame. 'What is this truth you
seek? What is this beauty?' men will ask in derision. If, nevertheless, God
have called any of you to explain truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be
true. When you shall say, 'As others do, so will I; I renounce, I am sorry
for it--my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning
and romantic speculations go until some more favorable season,' then dies
the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art and poetry and
science, as they have died already in a hundred thousand men. The hour of
that choice is the crisis in your history."

The age will demand steady headed men, men whose feet stand on the ground,
men who can see things as they really are, and act accordingly. "The
resolute facing of the world as it is, with all the garments of
make-believe thrown off,"--this, according to Huxley, is the sole cure for
the evils which beset men and nations. The only philosophy of life is that
derived from its science. We know right from wrong because the destruction
is plain in human experience. Right action brings abundance of life. Wrong
action brings narrowness, decay, and degeneration. A man must have
principles of life above all questions of the mere opportunities of to-day,
but these principles are themselves derived from experience. They belong to
the higher opportunism, the consideration of what is best in the long run.
The man who is controlled by an arbitrary system without reference to
conditions, is ineffective. He becomes a crank, a fanatic, a man whose aims
are out of all proportion to results. This is because he is dealing with an
imaginary world, not with the world as it is. We may admire the valiant
knight who displays a noble chivalry in fighting wind-mills, but we do not
call on a wind-mill warrior when we have some plain, real work to
accomplish. All progress, large or small, is the resultant of many forces.