elative to the lives that
entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of
consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most
legitimately engrossing of ideals.

Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere
ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape
or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the
most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and
verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance,
possibly have them on the most copious scale. Education, enlarging as it
does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals,
of bringing new ones into view. And your college professor, with a
starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all
alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most
absolutely and deeply significant of men. Tolstoi would be completely
blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our
new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off
the track of truth.

But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous.
The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do you
continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of
the laboring man's virtues are called into action on his part,--no
courage shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in
the attempt to get them realized. It is quite obvious that something
more than the mere possession of ideals is required to make a life
significant in any sense that claims the spectator's admiration. Inner
joy, to be sure, it may _have_, with its ideals; but that is its own
private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders as we are, with
our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging recognition,
it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the sterner
stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the
dimension of the active will, if we are to have _depth_, if we are to
have anything cubical and solid in the way of character.

The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly
recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two
different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken by
themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty. And
let the orientalists and