his maxim: "Ideas which in
religion and politics are truths, in history are living forces."

I do claim that it is timely for me to repeat these doctrines and to
urge them with vehemence, for they are generally repudiated by the
prevailing schools of ethnology and history in favor of the opinion that
objective, mechanical influences alone suffice to explain all the
phenomena of human life. This I pronounce an inadequate and an
unscientific opinion.

There is in living matter everywhere something which escapes the most
exhaustive investigation, some subtle center of impulse, which lies
beyond the domain of correlated energy, and which acts directively,
without increasing or diminishing the total of that energy. Also in the
transformations of organic forms, there are preparations and propulsions
which no known doctrine of the mechanical, natural causes can interpret.
We must accept the presence of the same powers, and in a greater
degree, in the life and the history of man.[17-1]

It may be objected that abstract ideas are far beyond the grasp of the
uncultivated intellect. The reply is, consciously to regard them as
abstract, may be; but they exist and act for all that. All sane people
think and talk according to certain abstract laws of grammar and logic;
and they act in similar unconsciousness of the abstractions which impel
them. Moreover, the Idea is usually clothed in a concrete Ideal, a
personification, which brings it home to the simplest mind. This was
long ago pointed out by the observant Machiavelli in his statement that
every reform of a government or religion is in the popular mind
personified as the effort of one individual.

In every nation or _ethnos_ there is a prevailing opinion as to what the
highest typical human being should be. This "Ideal of Humanity," as it
has been called, is more or less constantly and consciously pursued, and
becomes a spur to national action and to a considerable degree an
arbiter of national destiny. If the ideal is low and bestial, the course
of that nation is downward, self-destroying; if it is lofty and pure,
the energies of the people are directed toward the maintenance of those
principles which are elevating and preservative. These are not
mechanical forces, in any rational sense of the term; but they are
forces the potent directive and formative influence of which cannot be
denied and must not be underestimated.

Just in proportion as such ideas are numerous, clear