Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE HIGHEST IDEAL ‘TVHE living spirit of the ages is made up of ideals more or less visionary in their inception, more or less unattainable in their plenitude. And in nations, as in individuals, they are subject to the law o-f growth and decay?the law that governs the seed in the soil, the star-dust in the planetary system?as well as to the law of conservation. Like matter itself, an ideal is mutable, but indestructible. It does not die; it only undergoes a change. It expresses itself in art and literature and religion only after it has attained a certain degree of common conception. An idealist is ahead of his time only in the sense that he is articulate. The same is true of a nation. For even primitive people, even effete races have a message for those above or below them. The heritage of the Ideal, however small, can not be exhausted. That is why in periods of awakening, or of cataclysmic change, the light often comes from unremembered and unexpected sources?sources that were thought to be exhausted or barren. The ideals of Greece, of Rome, of the Orient, the ideals even of primitive man, come back to us, in the eternal cycle of the spirit, to leaven our own. They often surprise us in moments of depression or exaltation, in our silences, in our subliminal spells, even in our daily grind. Out of the vague, even vagrant conceptions of the mind an ideal slowly evolves, assumes definite shape and form. Error- bound but truth-directed, we are constantly moving to a certain goal in its unfolding infinitudes. Its fiat is universal, despite its apparent failures. The grocer as well as the poet, at one time or another, must recognize and accept its circulating medium. Whether they squander it or save it or invest it?whether they profit by it or not?is another questi…