Emotion Of The Ideal

( Originally Published 1918 )

TO get outside the effects of the obsessions of the past, and to be able to look the world straight in the face as it exists, is to have the conviction take possession of the mind with overwhelming force that the civilization of the West is as yet scarcely more than glorified savagery. What has happened in it is that those who have obtained power have endeavoured in the main to found all Western institutions on the heredity of the individual efficient in the struggle for his own interests. Taking this inborn heredity coming straight down from the time when the universal effort was for A to kill B before B was able to kill A, those who have prevailed thereby have organized it into what is called civilization. The result has been inevitable. In our international relations, to use the Hon. George Peel's memorable phrase, Western history is synonymous with universal homicide. And as the scales fall from our eyes we see our economic systems driven by the same inherent heredity, not indeed clothed in the euphemisms with which our textbooks have sought to robe them, but naked, and rather, as Treitschke described them, the permanent types of this business of war in which men stand continuously facing each other.

Civilization, in short, has not arrived. The characteristic power of civilization which renders it irresistible has never been brought into action. The stupendous potentiality of civilization as distinct from barbarism consists in its cultural or collective heredity imposed on the rising generation under suitable conditions. The most important element in this, namely, the idealisms of mind and spirit conveyed to the young of each generation under the influence of the social passion, is absolutely limitless in its effect. The power which is represented thereby is capable of creating a new world in the lifetime of a generation. It is capable of sweeping away in a single generation any existing order of the world. But it has never been seen actually in being, directed and controlled by civilization.

The recent fitful example of the reach of this power in the astounding history of modern Germany is the greatest event in modern history. But it is an event in which we have but the record of the creation and the use of cultural heredity directed almost exclusively to the ends of war, and to the fastening on the world of ideals founded on war, and dependent on war for their maintenance. Even so directed it has produced an example in history of organized self-sacrifice so colossal and so admirable as to appear, to use the words of a recent American writer, "almost superhuman, " albeit an example of almost superhuman power so misdirected as to constitute "one of the most pathetic events in the history of mankind. "

It is impossible to believe that civilization will allow the limitless power which it thus possesses to continue to be misdirected in this manner or to continue to lie latent. The endeavour to impose the idealisms of civilization collectively on the mind of the rising generation on an immense scale, with deliberation and intent, and with all the machinery of high organization under conditions in which the social emotion is profoundly moved is bound to be made in the future on a great scale.

The processes of the age have become a machinery for presenting the idealisms of mind to the general imagination with a hypnotic effect never before possible. The significance of the new forces has naturally been felt first and most deeply at the great centres of the nervous system of civilization represented by the national life of the leading countries. But this significance extends far beyond its relation to the ideals of nationality. Every institution in civilization is in fore-grips with a new kind of knowledge, the control of which will become a matter of life and death to it. It is clearly in evidence that the science of creating and transmitting public opinion under the influence of collective emotion is about to become the principal science of civilization to the mastery of which all governments and all powerful interests will in the future address themselves with every resource at their command.

It represents an enormous advance in knowledge once to grasp firmly in all its far-reaching import the fact that the human faculty in which centres the integration that is taking place in civilization is not the reasoning process of mind but the emotion of the ideal. At no distant time it will be seen that all the principal movements in Western thought since I published Social Evolution represent the ever-widening adjustment to this fact of the old intellectual positions. Whether we watch at our centres of learning writers like Mr. F. C. S. Schiller declaring the reasoned quest after absolute truth to be no longer an operative ideal, 1 or Bergson de-scribing the characteristic force of the world as that driving man to extract from himself more than there is by actual creation, or William James declaring that it is absolutely hopeless to attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the nature of the inner life in us which is nevertheless creating the world,, the reach and significance of the process of change is apparent.

The immature imaginings of the past about the place of reason in the world will all in time be put aside. Reason, whether it weighs the planets or discusses the nature of the Absolute, is but the mechanism of mind evolved in the past in correspondence to those forces which produced the individual integration. The individual of the past has of necessity been the individual efficient in the struggle for his own interests. But in the social integration which is proceeding, the eternal law of efficiency cannot be stated in terms of reason. For it can only be summarized in one word Sacrifice.

In this stage the law of efficiency is always sacrifice that sacrifice of the unit, the capacity for which in man proceeds from the emotion of the ideal alone. The power of sacrifice and renunciation is the first and last word in that kind of efficiency which is deepening in the social era of the race. Man can only reach his highest power in the social integration; and there is no cause in the universe which is able to render the individual, who is efficient in the struggle for his own interests, capable of the principle of sacrifice upon which the social integration rests, save only the Cause which expresses itself through the emotion of the ideal. Civilization has its origin, has its existence, and has the cause of its progress in the emotion of the ideal. It is through this faculty that the human mind rises to the Universal. It is his capacity for the emotion of the ideal and not his reasoning mind which constitutes Man the God-like, and which separates him from the brutes.

The first remarkable feature of the emotion of the ideal is that it is an attitude of mind which, for the deep physiological reasons to be referred to later, is most highly developed in the child. To produce the most permanent results results which in most cases are ineradicable afterwards the emotion of the ideal must always be appealed to in the mind of the child. One of the most significant passages in Mr. Bateson's essay dealing with inborn heredity in relation to society is that in which he recognizes, while not discussing the full bearing of the fact, that the altruistic emotions which, as here stated, give that capacity for sacrifice upon which civilization is founded are most highly developed in the young. As the inborn heredity of the individual of our existing civilization develops, "the altruistic emotions, " Mr. Bateson asserts, tend "to weaken after adolescence and to disappear as middle age supervenes. "

This is a true observation, in which is recorded a fact, the application of which is of the widest reach and import in the future of civilization. The extraordinary intensity of the emotion of the ideal in the mind of the child, and the part which this faculty plays in producing that capacity for sacrifice upon which civilization rests, must always be kept in view. It is the basal fact in the science of cultural heredity. Mr. Havelock Ellis repeats Professor Stanley Hall's saying that "the normal child feels the heroism of the unaccountable instinct of self-sacrifice" at a very early age, even "far earlier and more keenly than it can under-stand the sublimity of truth. " The bearing of this fact and its physiological import have only just begun to attract the attention of science. But knowledge of it has for long governed the direction of development in the higher movements in art, in religion, and in all great literatures.

The effect of the conceptions of mind conveyed to the young by training and example under the influence of the emotion of the ideal is absolutely ineradicable. It gives a permanent direction to character which can never be altered. It creates in the individual a capacity for sacrifice in the service of those ideals which rises above self-interest and which is entirely independent of the reasoning faculty of the human mind. In recent times the control of this limitless power through the direction of the emotion of the ideal in the young has been seen directed in its most characteristic forms to national ends. It has given in this connection the astonishing examples of sacrifice which have been witnessed in the great world war that began in 1914.

Throughout this war the capacity for sacrifice in men has been exhibited on an unparalleled scale under the sternest conditions. It has been seen continuously enabling great aggregates of men, amounting in total to millions, to meet resolutely almost certain death in massed formation in the service of Germany. It produced the same examples of sacrifice on a stupendous scale in the case of other countries engaged in the war. It gave civilization the example of millions of men enrolled by Great Britain and her peoples by voluntary enlistment going to meet death in the service of their cause with a cheerful and considered judgment on a scale which under such conditions is without any precedent in history. But in all these cases it would be found on inquiry that the strength of the devotion compelling to sacrifice for the ideals of nationality owed nothing to the inborn heredity of the individual, but had its spring and origin in the first instance in the collective heredity imposed on the rising generation under the influence of the emotion of the ideal powerfully awakened by teaching and example at some stage in the mind of childhood.

An indirect influence of the capacity for sacrifice thus created is to be witnessed far beyond that stage described by Bateson in which the altruistic emotions tend to weaken and disappear. A powerful effect is to be seen in its influence on general opinion. For however selfish the general outlook may become, men still, as William James has asserted, "tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for heroic sacrifice. . . No matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he is willing to risk death in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him for ever."

It has already been said that the work done by Germany in the creation and by the imposition on the rising generation of the collective idealisms of her nationality is the greatest event in modern history. It is a record, it is true, of immense power misdirected to atavistic ends. But this fact does not take from its significance. The true application of the lesson which it contains has yet to come within the full vision of civilization. It is exactly the lesson which I prophesied in the Herbert Spencer Lecture to the University of Oxford in 1908 that modern Germany had to deliver to the world.2 It has become a lesson which must now, as a matter of life and death, be applied by civilization as soon as it is apprehended. It is, for this reason, of vital importance to concentrate attention on the mechanism of the process as it is to be seen actually in being.

In that process in modern Germany by which the psychology of a whole people was changed in a generation the fundamental fact to be grasped is that the seat and centre of the vast experiment throughout the whole period of accomplishment was in the mind of the young. It was the German educational system which created the psychology which carried modern Germany into the world war of 1914 with all its far-reaching consequences. The giving of definite direction to the German educational system was, moreover, the work of but a few persons. It was in the main the achievement of but two persons of Adalbert Falk, Prussian Minister of Education up to 1879, and of the Emperor William II. In most countries the leaders of great national movements are looked for amongst the intellects that have been prominent in the various national activities and in the national systems of culture. But in Germany in this work it was different. In Prussia it was to the teachers of the elementary schools that the State looked first for support in its attempt to create the idealisms of German nationalism and to impose them on the young. After these it looked to the teachers of the higher schools and then to the university professoriate. It was only in the last phase that the adult mind of the nation was considered.

Soon after his accession the Emperor William II personally addressed the elementary and upper school teachers of his realms and laid before them his ideas as to the necessity of concentrating the mind of the young on national ideals through the scheme of education which was immediately afterwards imposed on the nation. In the address and in the scheme the idealization of war, the idealization of the German nation as resting on war, and the idealization of the part played in each by the House of Hohenzollern occupied a prominent place. The spirit of this speech and of the measures which followed it was carried afterwards into every detail of education by the whole organized power of the State in Germany.

The effect on the rising generation in Germany of this auswärtige Kulturpolitik, which may be translated to mean in practice the continuous presentation of national conceptions to the young mind of Germany under the influence of the emotion of the ideal, was profound. It is necessary to try to imagine, however imperfectly, what actually took place. The ideals which were set up were continuously impressed by teachers on the mind of the young of a whole people from the earliest age. We must get rid of the common and superficial notion that these ideals of German nationality could be visible to outsiders of other nations as they were visible to the German people. For the power of the whole experiment lay in this. The German system touched the springs of mind at its deepest psychological centres in always presenting the national aims closely associated with that conception of sacrifice and duty to which the emotion of the ideal is inseparably allied in the mind of the young.

The leading ideas underlying the German educational system bore in nearly all their features a strong resemblance to those propounded earlier by Mazzini to his countrymen. 1 Mazzini's clarion cry of the ideal re-echoes throughout it. The bearing, moreover, of Mazzini's profound distinction that education is addressed through emotion to the moral faculties in the young and instruction to the intellectual and that the life of a nation is always in its education was everywhere apprehended by the German mind.

It is necessary then to imagine this organized teaching of the ideal of German nationalism imposed on the young of the nation in the elementary schools following the youth of the country into the higher schools. It is necessary to consider it again following the rising generation into the universities at a more advanced stage. And still later it is necessary to imagine the whole adult nation with the same ideals preached to it continuously by officials, by the organized State, and last of all by the Emperor at the head of the State.

The higher collective policy of the State in the final stage was well described in a letter written in June, 1913, a year before the outbreak of the great war, by Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, to Professor Lamprecht of the University of Leipzig, urging the constant support and cooperation of the educated classes in the work of keeping the national ideals before the German people. It was particularly defined with surprising earnestness, simplicity, and power by the Emperor William IT in a long series of addresses, numbering nearly one thousand, during the first twenty-five years of his reign, delivered on occasions of nearly every type of public duty.

The aim of the State throughout this work was everywhere to orientate public opinion through the heads of both its spiritual and temporal departments, through the bureaucracy, through the officers of the army, through the State direction of the Press, and last of all through the State direction of the entire trade and industry of the nation, so as to bring the idealism of the whole people to a conception of and to a support of the national policy of modern Germany.

It is the emotion of the ideal that we have in view through all this stupendous making of history in modern Germany as it has influenced the world. It was the conception of duty and the capacity for sacrifice evoked in the mind of the young at an early stage through the emotion of the ideal on which the whole fabric was based and in which the vitality of the whole conception lay.

This fact already remarked on as regards the schools is particularly in evidence in the Emperor's speeches on almost all matters. In the Emperor's addresses to the recruits of the army and navy on the occasions of the annual swearings in and in his addresses to the army there was mingled even with that note of appeal to the primal instinct in man, which on one occasion 1 drew severe condemnation from Tolstoy, the continuous note of the necessity for sacrifice, duty, discipline, devotion, iron obedience in the service of the national ideals. On wider public occasions side by side with the extraordinary mixture of the ethics of Nietzsche and Haeckel with the ethics of Christianity it was still the inculcation of the spirit of the effort and the sacrifice needful in the service of the national ideals which constituted the most characteristic note in the Emperor's addresses--"To us, the German people, great ideals are a lasting possession . the fostering of the ideal is the greatest work of Culture."

It is impossible to overestimate the influence of the emotion of the ideal in such a case. It is the effect of the capacity for sacrifice which it produced that resounds through the history of modern Germany. Even as applied therein to the realization of the lowest and coarsest aims of war the effect in organized form is such as to sup-port fully the description used by the American writer already quoted of "almost superhuman." If the national ideals which were placed in the foreground had not been atavistic and had been in line with the meaning of evolving civilization it is not too much to say that there is nothing which modern Germany could not have accomplished in the world by the means that were employed.

The conclusion upon which the mind must be concentrated is that it is inevitable that civilization will look in future to the emotion of the ideal employed under such conditions for the accomplishment of its aims. The science of the function of the emotion of the ideal in the social integration that is proceeding is nothing more and is nothing less than the science of efficiency and therefore the science of all winning causes in civilization. The immeasurable futility of any other kind of knowledge appealing to us as the science of efficiency in civilization will gradually be borne in with the conviction on the mind of the world. Once we have grasped the elemental difference between the cause of efficiency in the individual integration resting on self-assertion and the cause of efficiency in the social integration resting on selflessness, the fundamental importance of the emotion of the ideal as a cause of human progress becomes steadily visible.

It is the principles of the child mind in their relation to the capacity for sacrifice in the individual which underlie the ascending curve of efficiency in every social institution of the race. It is the mind of the child, before the child passes under the influence of that inborn heredity of the individual, efficient in the struggle for the possession of property, as described with such extraordinary illumination by Bateson, which constitutes the basal fact upon which the social integration is being reared.

Every organized force in civilization, from that of political parties and of the national life of peoples down to those represented by the vast hidden underworld of finance which wraps and enfolds all things, is grasping this fact by the fundamental instinct of its life that the emotion of the ideal has become the first cause in the world to be reckoned with under modern conditions.

It was the emotion of the ideal, similarly applied through the collective inheritance imposed by the nation on the rising generation, and applied so as to bring into existence the strong sense of duty and the capacity for sacrifice with which it is always intimately allied in the minds of the young, which created that other utterly unforeseen and incalculable phenomenon of the modern world, namely, the new-born power of Japan. There is still no Western nation outside of Germany which has so clearly apprehended the significance in the future of the fact that the science of the emotion of the ideal is the science of power in civilization. In all her recent dealings with China it may be noticed that behind the more sensational events that excite the attention of politicians, it is the struggle of Japan for the mind of the young and for control of the schools, through which the young of the rising generation can be influenced under the conditions desired, which occupies consistently the attention of the leaders of the Japanese nation.

That the result to be obtained in civilization by the method of influencing the world through the social inheritance as here described reduces to insignificance those possible by any eugenic scheme whatsoever founded on the inborn heredity of the individual, is a conclusion which comes to the mind with great strength of conviction. The prolonged concentration in the past of the intellect of the West on the comparatively unimportant part played by the inborn heredity of the individual in human evolution, instead of on the immense function of the cultural heredity of society imposed on the mind of the young of each generation under the influence of the emotion of the ideal, is one of the most remarkable, as it is one of the most pregnant, facts in the history of mankind. It is a cause which has undoubtedly for long retarded the delayed development of civilization.

This fact is all the more striking, as there has been for a long period foreshadowed in the West in nearly every leading branch of the activities of the Western mind an instinctive perception of the true, line which human evolution is taking, and of the importance in the development in civilization of qualities reaching their highest expression only in the mind of the young.

For instance, in science the fact has been on record that the development of the human face after childhood into the usual adult maturity, wherein Bateson described the altruistic emotions as tending "to weaken after adolescence," represents development towards a type of face which for some unexplained cause strikes the mind, and is instinctively recognized by the mind as nearer the apelike in character.

Havelock Ellis, remarking on this fact, speaks of the type of face which the child represents as appearing to be for some reason the standard to which universal civilization is moving.' In this connection it has often been remarked, as we shall see in detail later, that the type of face amongst peoples of advanced civilization is quite distinctive in its youthfulness. Progress from savagery to civilization is marked by an increasing youth-fulness of appearance amongst typical races in the advance upwards. Professor Chamberlain in his studies of the child mind has laid emphasis on a conclusion bearing in the same direction. The human child, he considers, acquires a more apelike appearance as it advances towards the adult stage. When the individual enters upon that mature stage after adolescence discussed by Mr. Bateson, in which it is stated that the altruistic feelings begin to fail and disappear; there has been lost in him what Professor Chamberlain calls "the comparative ultra-human characteristics of his early childhood." The qualities foreshadowed in the child, he adds in another chapter, "seem to be those which will one day be the most valued possession of the race."

Again it may be noticed that the instinct that the qualities which reach their highest development in the young are related to the highest standards of civilization in the future, is expressed with remarkable strength and consistency throughout all the higher phases of Western Art. Every student who has reached the last meanings of Greek Art will have come in view sooner or later of the fact that there was a clear conception of the Greek mind ever seeking with great force to express itself through Greek Art. He will have come to the conviction that it was in its representations of the quality of the childlike in the human face that Greek Art struggled to express its highest content. In this effort of the Greek genius to reproduce the content of the child mind in its representations of the human face, the beholder, in short, is witnessing nothing less than the sustained attempt of this surprisingly endowed West-ern people thus to utter the soul of the world through the medium of its art.

It is the note of this struggle which re-echoes throughout all Western art down to the present time. The instinctive perception of the superiority and of the supremacy of the child mind in civilization is witnessed in all the higher phases of Western literature. The conception that genius represents or is closely allied to the childlike and that the mark of both is their superior relationship to the universal permeates all the literature of the West, as indeed it does to a lesser degree all the great literatures of the world. It is a similar note which characterizes the inner life of all the higher forms of religion. "Except ye become as little children" ye cannot enter the higher life or see with the higher vision is the sustained expression of this fact in the Christian religion.

The evolutionary bearing of these phenomena cannot be mistaken. Once there has been grasped the central significance of the emotion of the ideal in relation to collective efficiency and of the circumstance that it is only in the mind of the child that the emotion of the ideal can be evoked in the conditions in which it produces its highest, its most permanent, and its most transforming results upon the cultural heredity of civilization, the reach of the facts is evident. A knowledge of the meaning of such facts is the first step to the science of power in civilization. For what we are really watching in the phenomena described is the gradual emergence into view of what has become the principal cause of collective efficiency in the era of the social integration of the world.

The overmastering and revolutionary effect of the emotion of the ideal in the mind of the child directed through the cultural inheritance of civilization cannot be better exemplified than by at-tempting to imagine it in operation in the most difficult and extreme example which it is possible to conceive.

The most distant ideal, on the sense of being the most remote from realization, which the human mind could possibly have set before itself in the West for some generations past has been the ideal of permanent universal peace. The utter remoteness of the prospect under existing conditions was visible to all thinking minds immediately before the outbreak of the world war in 1914. It was visible in the spectacle of the armed and arming nations of civilization getting down to the first principles of force. But it was apparent also for a deeper reason through another fact, namely, the nature of the case for peace which has come to be presented by pacifists to the world.

In the case for peace, as it had come to be put before the war which began in 1914, peace was urged upon civilization, not because it was an object worthy of the vastest sacrifice in its attainment, but because it was the sound economic policy of the nations. War was condemned vehemently, not because it was the last crime of civilization, but because it was held to be a great illusion to believe that it was a more profitable national policy than peace. It would of course be quite unfair to imagine this as the full meaning of the case for peace, for the spirit if not the form of the propaganda rose far above this level in most minds. Yet the fact remained that war was denounced essentially not as war but as the policy which, to use Sir William Robertson Nicoll's scathing phrase, "would postpone the blessed hour of tranquil money getting."

The inherent hopelessness of attempting to convert a warring world to a policy of universal peace with such a creed stood revealed to all thinking minds. For the first credential of every living movement in civilization is the capacity for sacrifice which it is capable of creating, sacrifice at whatever cost for the ends believed in. Even the creed of war demanding as it has continuously done the greatest sacrifice of which human nature is capable for its cause, was immeasurably nobler and greater than the creed of peace as thus declared.

Now it is evident that no doctrine of interests can ever abolish war. In civilization where the first principle of life is sacrifice any utilitarian creed of conduct whatsoever founded on the greatest material interest of the existing individual is always and essentially what Mr. Arthur Balfour once luminously defined systems of opinion of this type to be parasitic. It may flourish in the midst of the other life around it, but it has no roots of its own and it will wilt in the first stress of realism. Nothing can supersede war in civilization except some cause strong enough to overwhelm and control that inborn heredity of the fight in man which has come down in him from all the ages of the past and which has been carried by him in particular into every institution of Western civilization.

Can such a cause ever exist in the world? To imagine it universally operative between nations there is no answer but to turn to a cause now operative between men within the civil law of civilization.

To the average man it scarcely ever occurs to imagine the reason why the ordinary law-abiding, honour-respecting citizen whom he meets in daily life observes the law of civilization and never dreams of becoming a swindler or a highwayman. To the mind which is simply shrewd the over-ruling reason seems to be that in civilization a well-organized system of society resting on law, which rests in turn on irresistible force, makes such a course unreasonable by rendering it a venture foolish and unprofitable in the extreme for any person to attempt to break the law. That honesty is the best policy just as peace is urged as the best policy is regarded as a quite obvious and sufficient reason for pursuing it.

Yet how utterly wide of the truth such an answer would be. The ordinary law-abiding citizen does not break the law and does not become a swindler or a highwayman. But not for any cause which rests on any reasoning of this kind. He does not break the law simply because it is impossible for him to do so. It would be impossible for him to do so if there were no self-interest of this nature to warn him, and no irresistible force to overtake him, and no organized system of society to punish him. He cannot break the law, not because he fears civil punishment, but because he knows beyond doubt that however successfully he might hope to attempt it, however great the gain which he might expect to secure from it it would be of no use to him. For he would have lost by the act all that makes life worth living in losing the internal standard of himself which he carries in his mind.

At some stage of his career, in short, the aver-age individual of civilization whom we meet on every side of us has passed permanently under the influence of the emotion of the ideal. It was conveyed to him by teaching or example through the cultural inheritance. And he has, thereby, passed irrevocably into another world. He can never free himself from the influence of that internal standard which has been set up within him. It will pursue him to the end. Thompson invoked it as the Hound of Heaven. "I fled him," he groaned in his anguish, " down the nights and down the days, I fled him down the arches of the years, I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind." But in vain ! Never can the individual escape the pursuer, never can he revert to be the man he would otherwise have become. Even the lowest and meanest individual is in such circumstances capable of the most surprising degree of sacrifice before he will prove entirely unfaithful to that unseen internal standard which he carries in his inner mind.

This miracle takes place around us in the world on a universal scale in every generation. There is no way the human mind can conceive in which war can be abolished amongst nations except by a similar miracle. Universal peace can only be secured in one way by raising the mind of civilization, through the emotion of the ideal conveyed to the rising generation by the collective inheritance, to a plane where the barbarism of war would be so abhorrent to it that the degradation of engaging in it would take away from a people that principal motive of self-respect which makes life worth living.

Given clear vision in the general mind, this cultural inheritance, utterly impossible as it might seem, could be imposed on civilization in a single generation. Only in a condition of the world in which such a collective inheritance would be imposed on the mind of each generation is it possible to conceive international law ever becoming endowed with the same irresistible authority among nations as the civil law now possesses amongst men.

Only in such circumstances is it possible to conceive material force reduced to that legitimate function among nations which it now occupies in civil life, namely, the protection under the direction of civilization of the higher and more developed standards of the race against what would then become the criminal standards of the less-evolved societies of men.

It is evident on reflection that there is no goal to which the emotion of the ideal thus directed is not capable of carrying the human mind. Fit-fully and ignorantly as it has been employed in the past, it is the cause which has been behind all the progress of the world. It is capable of accomplishing any purpose to which it may be steadily directed over long periods of time. It is the nature of the inner vision which it brings into being that it leaves the possessor never satisfied with the world as it is, and that it drives him through every degree of effort to endeavour to realize his ideal. Evoked under suitable conditions in the mind of the young, it is able to render the successive generations of men upon whom it acts fixed of purpose, capable of the most surprising labours, and sufficient to otherwise impossible measures of self subordination and self sacrifice.

It is in this cause of the emotion of the ideal that we have undoubtedly the springs of all power in the modern conditions of the world. It is no exaggeration but a sober statement of fact to say that it is capable of sweeping out of civilization in a single generation any institution, or any order of society, or any inheritance of the past. Although it has never been organized in the science of civilization on a vast scale in modern conditions it has been the cause which every leader of men has employed in the past. Every deep seeing mind of the race from the founders of its first religions, from Plato in his groping after the meaning of the soul in the Phaedrus, from the prophets of Hebrewism and the leaders of Christianity down to the seers of the current age—has felt the-illimitable significance of the emotion of the ideal in the development of the world. It is the characteristic cause of the social integration, the cause which Mr. Compton Leith attempted to define to us in Sirenica when he described it as a passion more powerful in man than any animal desire.

The science of this Cause is the science of power in civilization. The manner in which it constructively works in the individual mind is well de-scribed by James in his Text Book of Psychology, although he did not touch those wider collective aspects to be discussed later in Chapter IX. A leader-writer in the Times 2 recently accurately described the emotion of the ideal, when he spoke of it as giving that inward call in the human mind under the influence of which every human institution has the power of prophesying to us its finer self so as to make us for ever discontented with its present state.

Under this influence the human mind rises permanently above all reasoned theories of utilitarian conduct. It is thus that the higher religious beliefs of the world have permanently influenced successive generations of men to seek to reach those apparently unattainable inward ideals of perfection which it is characteristic of every living religion that it sets before its adherents. It is thus that Professor Gilbert Murray saw the Greek mind in the development of the Greek epic endeavouring to cast off in history the brute inheritance of the past of the race., It is thus we behold the passion of the Absolute in the soul of the poet and the artist challenging the world for an ideal which has never yet been realized.

Every mind of the race possessing the vision of genius has at some moment felt thus the illimitable superiority of the emotion of the ideal to every other human quality. "It is not by any-thing written since the beginning in textbooks of social science that the world has advanced," said Mr. H. G. Wells on one occasion to the writer. "The human mind has always accomplished progress by its construction of Utopias." This is a true saying. It has been the emotion of the ideal which has brought to the harvest of action the souls of all the leaders of all the causes which have been since the world began. How to organize this illimitable Cause under the conditions of the modern world is the problem before the human spirit. The master fact of the social integration is that the science of power in civilization is the science of the passion for the ideal. The passion for the ideal is the passion of perfection, which is the passion for God.