hand, have their great place in literature; for they are forms of the
intermediate world of conflict. I speak of the spiritual world of man's
will. We may conceive of the world optimistically as a place in which
all shall issue in good and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by
alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in its
voluntary and individual action may save or lose the soul at its choice.
We may think of God as conserving all, or as permitting hell, which is
death. We do not know. But as shown to us in imagination, idealism,
which is the race's dream of truth, hovers between these two worlds
known to us in tendency if not in conclusion,--the world of salvation on
the one hand, in proportion as the order of life is made vital in us,
the world of damnation on the other hand, in proportion as the order of
death prevails in our will; but the main effort of idealism is to show
us the war between the two, with an emphasis on the becoming of the
reality of beauty, joy, reason, and virtue in us. Not that prosperity
follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly
measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how
we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter
fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or
those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile
environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring the
actual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil by setting
them in contrast with what ought to be, by showing virtue militant not
only against external enemies but those inward weaknesses of our
mortality with its passion and ignorance, which are our most undermining
and intimate foes. Here is no false world, but just that world which is
our theatre of action, that confused struggle, represented in its
intelligible elements in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and the
universe, which must be overcome; and this is revealed to us in the ways
most profitable for our instruction, who are bound to seek to realize