is dealing.

This is true Idealism; but it is also true Realism. It is not only the
fact, but the truth. The fact may be observed, but the truth must be
discerned by insight,--it is not within the range of mere observation;
and it is this insight, this discernment of realities in their
relation to the whole order of things, which characterises true
Idealism, and which makes all the greater writers Idealists in the
fundamental if not in the technical sense. Tolstoi has often been
called a Realist by those who are eager to label everything and
everybody succinctly; but Tolstoi is one of the representative
Idealists of his time, and his "Master and Man" is one of the most
touching and sincere bits of true Idealism which has been given the
world for many a day.

There is nothing which needs such constant reinforcement as this
faculty of seeing things in their totality; for we are largely at the
mercy of the hour unless we invoke the aid of the imagination to set
the appearances of the moment in their large relations. To the man who
sees things as they rush like a stream before him, there is no order,
progression, or intelligent movement in human affairs; but to the
student who brings to the study of current events wide and deep
knowledge of the great historic movements, these apparently unrelated
phenomena disclose the most intimate inter-relations and connections.
The most despairing pessimism would be born in the heart of the man
who should be fated to see to-day apart from yesterday and to-morrow;
a rational and inspiring hope may be born in the soul of the man who
sees the day as part of the year and the year as part of the century.
The great writers are a refuge from the point of view of the moment,
because they set the events of life in a fundamental order, and make
us aware of the finer potentialities of our race. They are Idealists
in the breadth of their vision and the nobility of the interpretation
of events which they offer us.

Chapter XXIII.

The Vision of Perfection.

These writers are also, by virtue of the faculty of discerning the
interior relations of appearances and events, the expositors of that
ultimate Idealism which not only discovers the possibility of the
whole in the parts, of the perfect in the imperfect, but which
discovers the whole, the complete and the perfect, and brings each
before us in some noble form. The reality of the Ideal as Plato saw it
is by no means universally accep