e, or his
nation the test of all excellence. This test is the perpetual
concomitant ideal of the life it is applied to. As all could not be well
in the world if my own purposes were defeated, so the general excellence
of things would be heightened if other men's purposes also had been
fulfilled. Each will is a true centre for universal estimation. As each
will, therefore, comes to expression, real and irreversible values are
introduced into the world, and the historian, in estimating what has
been hitherto achieved, needs to make himself the spokesman for all past
aspirations.

If the Egyptian poets sang well, though that conduces not at all to our
advantage, and though all those songs are now dumb, the Life of Reason
was thereby increased once for all in pith and volume. Brief erratic
experiments made in living, if they were somewhat successful in their
day, remain successes always: and this is the only kind of success that
in the end can be achieved at all. The philosopher that looks for what
is good in history and measures the past by the scale of reason need be
no impertinent dogmatist on that account. Reason would not be reason but
passion if it did not make all passions in all creatures constituents of
its own authority. The judgments it passes on existence are only the
judgments which existence, so far, has passed on itself, and these are
indelible and have their proportionate weight though others of many
different types may surround or succeed them.

[Sidenote: Transition to historical romance.]

To inquire what everybody has thought about the world, and into what
strange shapes every passionate dream would fain have transformed
existence, might be merely a part of historical investigation. These
facts of preference and estimation might be made to stand side by side
with all other facts in that absolute physical order which the universe
must somehow possess. In the reference book of science they would all
find their page and line. But it is not for the sake of making vain
knowledge complete that historians are apt to linger over heroic
episodes and commanding characters in the world's annals. It is not even
in the hope of discovering just to what extent and in how many
directions experience has been a tragedy. The mathematical balance of
failure and success, even if it could be drawn with accuracy, would not
be a truth of moral importance, since whatever that balance might be for
the world at large, success a