each of us does there not go one who mourns over our fall and pities us,
gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal
self, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth
is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizing
temperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit the
art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more does
the fool in all his motley the art of literature.

Must I, however, come back to my answer, and meet those who aver that
however stimulating idealism is to the soul, yet it must be remembered
that in the world at large there is nothing corresponding to ideal
order, to poetic ethics, and that to act these forth as the supremacy of
what ought to be is to misrepresent life, to raise expectations in youth
never to be realized, to pervert practical standards, and in brief to
make a false start that can be fruitful only in error, in subsequent
suffering of mind, and with material disadvantage? I must be frank: I
own that I can perceive in Nature no moral order, that in her world
there is no knowledge of us or of our ideals, and that in general her
order often breaks upon man's life with mere ruin, irrational and
pitiful; and I acknowledge, also, the prominence of evil in the social,
and its invasion in the individual, life of man. But, again, were we so
situated that there should be no external divine order apparent to our
minds, were justice an accident and mercy the illusion of wasted prayer,
there would still remain in us that order whose workings are known
within our own bosom, that law which compels us to be just and merciful
in order to lead the life that we recognize to be best, and the whole
imperative of our ideal, which, if we fail to ourselves, condemns us,
irrespective of what future attends us in the world. Ideal order as the
mind knows it, the mind must strive to realize, or stand dishonoured in
its own forum. Within us, at least, it exists in hope and somewhat in