s happy as possible, or to be equal to his
responsibilities, or to fulfil the expectation of his mother, or to be
distinguished, wealthy, or influential. This list of ideals is
miscellaneous, and ethically reducible to more fundamental concepts, but
these are the terms in which men are ordinarily conscious of their most
intimate purposes. We must now inquire respecting the nature of the
thought that determines the selection of such a purpose, or justifies it
when it has been unconsciously accepted.

[Sidenote: The Philosophy of the Devotee, the Man of Affairs, and the
Voluptuary.]

Sect. 5. What is most worth while? So far as human action is concerned
this obviously depends upon what is possible, upon what is expected of
us by our own natures, and upon what interests and concerns are
conserved by the trend of events in our environment. What I had best
do, presupposes what I have the strength and the skill to do, what I
feel called upon to do, and what are the great causes that are entitled
to promotion at my hands. It seems that practically we cannot separate
the ideal from the real. We may feel that the highest ideal is an
immediate utterance of conscience, as mysterious in origin as it is
authoritative in expression. We may be willing to defy the universe, and
expatriate ourselves from our natural and social environment, for the
sake of the holy law of duty. Such men as Count Tolstoi have little to
say of the possible, or the expedient, or the actual, and are satisfied
to stand almost alone against the brutal facts of usage and economy. We
all have a secret sense of chivalry, that prompts, however
ineffectually, to a like devotion. But that which in such moral purposes
appears to indicate a severance of the ideal and the real, is, if we
will but stop to consider, only a severance of the ideal and the
apparent. The martyr is more sure of reality than the adventurer. He is
convinced that though his contemporaries and his environment be against
him; the fundamental or eventual order of things is for him. He believes
in a spiritual world more abiding, albeit less obvious, than the
material world. Though every temporal event contradict him, he lives in
the certainty that eternity is his. Such an one may have found his ideal
in the voice of God and His prophets, or he may have been led to God as
the justification of his irresistible ideal; but in either case the
selection of his ideal is reasonable to him in so far as it i