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
disillusion.
Indeed, as the race grows older and masters more and more a knowledge
of its conditions, the impression of the essential greatness of the
experience we call life deepens in the finer spirits. It becomes clear
that the end towards which the hopes of the world have always moved is
farther off than it seemed to the earlier generations; that the
process of spiritual and social evolution is longer and more painful;
that the universe is vaster and more wonderful than the vision of it
which formed in the imagination of thinkers and poets; in a word, that
the education which is being imparted to humanity by the very
structure of the conditions under which it lives grows more severe,
prolonged, and exacting as its methods and processes become more
clear.
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