fe and
extending equally to both sexes; the ideal of the unity and correlation
of knowledge; the faith in good and immortality--are the vacant forms of
light on which Plato is seeking to fix the eye of mankind.

8. Two other ideals, which never appeared above the horizon in Greek
Philosophy, float before the minds of men in our own day: one seen more
clearly than formerly, as though each year and each generation brought
us nearer to some great change; the other almost in the same degree
retiring from view behind the laws of nature, as if oppressed by them,
but still remaining a silent hope of we know not what hidden in the
heart of man. The first ideal is the future of the human race in this
world; the second the future of the individual in another. The first is
the more perfect realization of our own present life; the second,
the abnegation of it: the one, limited by experience, the other,
transcending it. Both of them have been and are powerful motives of
action; there are a few in whom they have taken the place of all earthly
interests. The hope of a future for the human race at first sight seems
to be the more disinterested, the hope of individual existence the more
egotistical, of the two motives. But when men have learned to resolve
their hope of a future either for themselves or for the world into the
will of God--'not my will but Thine,' the difference between them falls
away; and they may be allowed to make either of them the basis of their
lives, according to their own individual character or temperament. There
is as much faith in the willingness to work for an unseen future in this
world as in another. Neither is it inconceivable that some rare nature
may feel his duty to another generation, or to another century, almost
as strongly as to his own, or that living always in the presence of God,
he may realize another world as vividly as he does this.

The greatest of all ideals may, or rather must be conceived by us under
similitudes derived from human qualities; although sometimes, like the
Jewish prophets, we may dash away these figures of speech and describe
the nature of God only in negatives. These again by degrees acquire a
positive meaning. It would be well, if when meditating on the higher
truths either of philosophy or religion, we sometimes substituted one
form of expression for another, lest through the necessities of language
we should become the slaves of mere words.

There is a third ideal, not