pessimists say what they will, the thing of
deepest--or, at any rate, of comparatively deepest--significance in life
does seem to be its character of _progress_, or that strange union of
reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another
to present. To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call
intelligence. Not every one's intelligence can tell which novelties are
ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the
older more familiar good. In this case character, though not
significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. So, if we
are to choose which is the more essential factor of human character, the
fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must side with Tolstoi,
and choose that simple faithfulness to his light or darkness which any
common unintellectual man can show.

* * * * *

But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to
be reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking things up and
dropping them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and dropped that; then
Tolstoi and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, I
took up ideals, and seem now almost dropping those. But please observe
in what sense it is that I drop them. It is when they pretend _singly_
to redeem life from insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are
not enough to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined
with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance
and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be
some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles,
for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.

Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a question of
significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise. The
answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a
balance struck by sympathy, insight, and good will. But it is an answer,
all the same, a real conclusion. And, in the course of getting it, it
seems to me that our eyes have been opened to many important things.
Some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you were an hour ago
of the depths of worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives. And,
when you ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount
is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion
of the combi