A purely ideal world--a
world fashioned wholly apart from the realities which convey definite,
concrete revelations of what is in us and in our world--would
necessarily be an unmoral world. The relationships which bind men
together and give human intercourse such depth and richness spring
into being only when they are actually entered upon; they could never
be understood or foreseen in a world of pure thought; nor would it be
possible, in such a world, to realise that reaction of the deed upon
the doer which creates character, nor that far-reaching influence of
the deed upon society, and the sequence of events which so often
issues in tragedy and from which history derives its immense interest
and meaning. A world which stopped short of realisation in action
would not only lose the fathomless dramatic interest which inheres in
human life, but it would part with all those moral implications of the
integrity and persistence of the individual soul, its moral quality
and its moral responsibility, which make man something different from
the dust which whirls about him on the highway, or the stone over
which he stumbles.
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