The most despairing pessimism would be born in the heart of the man
who should be fated to see to-day apart from yesterday and to-morrow;
a rational and inspiring hope may be born in the soul of the man who
sees the day as part of the year and the year as part of the century.
The great writers are a refuge from the point of view of the moment,
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.
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