Ideal world

“ Everywhere there stands over against this ideal some critic who says: “The choice of this aim for life is an accident. I reject this boastful ideal. For where in reality is found the firm basis of fact on which the ideal is founded?” Then possibly the idealist, relaxing the rigor of his idealism, points out in the external world some real or mythical support for his ideal. ”

“ Every such ideal realized will be one moment in the world's salvation. But these particular ideals are not bare abstract possibilities. They are grounded, they are LIVE possibilities, for we are their live champions and pledges, and if the complementary conditions come and add themselves, our ideals will become actual things. What now are the complementary conditions? ”

“ Its essential features are calm, majesty, serenity.
At a lower degree the ideal is in man the victory of the eternal principles that fill the human heart, the triumph of the nobler part of the soul, the moral and divine principle.
But the ideal manifested in the world becomes action, and action implies a form of society, a determinate situation with collision, and an action properly so called. The heroic age is the best society for the ideal in action ”

“ For, as I shall strive to show in a succeeding chapter, the essence of man's life as spiritual, that is as intelligent and moral, is its self-realizing activity. Intellectual and moral life is progress, although it is the progress of an ideal which is real and complete, the return of the infinite to itself through the finite. The cessation of the progress of the ideal in man, whereby man interprets the 145 world in terms of himself and makes it the instrument of his purposes, is intellectual and moral death. ”

“ Closely connected with this moral end is the more purely intellectual aim of education, the endeavour to make us see and imagine the world in an objective manner, as far as possible as it is in itself, and not merely through the distorting medium of personal desire. The complete attainment of such an objective view is no doubt an ideal, indefinitely approachable, but not actually and fully realisable. ”

“ In taking its suggestion for the ideal from the world, noble society chose to accept economic conditions as they were, and to fashion an ideal which necessarily shut out the larger portion of humanity from the possibility of attaining it. The æsthetic satisfaction which we draw from the sunset is due to the pleasure which conscience feels in its allegiance to an ideal of its own devising, and seeing God is only another term for the solemn identification of man's aspirations. ”

“ I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world. ”

“ It is just because all meanings, in the end, will prove to be internal meanings, that this which the internal meaning most loves, namely the presence of concrete fulfilment, of life, of pulsating and originative will, of freedom, and of individuality, will prove, for our view, to be of the very essence of the Absolute Meaning of the world. ”

“ To believe in an ever-living and perfect Mind, supreme over the universe, is to invest moral distinctions with immensity and eternity, and lift them from the provincial stage of human society to the imperishable theatre of all being. When planted thus in the very substance of things, they justify and support the ideal estimates of the conscience ”

“ The devotion to the ideal in us presupposes therefore the most strenuous and persistent effort to learn these modes of control, to understand the deep and intricate ways of life, and to bend every power—of mind and body, of science and art—to bring life into harmony with their fundamental demands. ”

“ As I have said on a former occasion: "It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. ”

“ For this is to know what manhood means, and a manly life, not by grave precept, or wise proverb, or ideal picture; but to see the ideal in complete equipment and compact in reality before you, as undeniably and as efficiently as the sun that sheds light from the sky, or the mountain that sheds waters into the glen. ”

“ The reverence for nature, for its symbolism, the sanctions of religion, the transcendental belief, the poetic insight have somewhat fallen away, and the world is partly barren because not yet rehabilitated. Ideals are regarded as fit for schoolgirl essays, for weakly sentimentality, for dreamers, for those who do not understand the meaning of the new science and the new civilization. Ideals! The transcendent importance of ideals is just appearing. ”

“ And we, on this sea of human thought, in like manner inquire, Where are the old idealists? where are they who represented to the last generation that extravagant hope, which a few happy aspirants suggest to ours? In looking at the class of counsel, and power, and wealth, and at the matronage of the land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality, one asks, Where are they who represented genius, virtue, the invisible and heavenly world, to these? ”

“ I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons."—But, "seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God,"—as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. ”

“ Without Knowledge of the Human Nature. “Varied, according to character, are the demands made by heart and mind,” assures us a representative of modern philosophy, “corresponding to them is the image of the world to which the individual turns by inner necessity. ”

“ Ideals, the symbols of the truth which we conceive, of the beauty which we imagine, and of the good which we long for, have as great an influence in the world as ideas, if not even greater. High ideals and loyalty to them are virtues which are requisite to the existence and safety of a progressive society. ”

“ Thus it is that ideals are a living, vital agency in unfolding the latent virtues of man and so shaping his character.
Hence we may perceive that in these three addresses we have, if I may use the ambitious expression, a full chart of our life — its right methods, its favourable circumstances and its ultimate realisation. Cultivate your self, sparing no pains. Seek and imbibe lofty ideals, drawing no invidious distinction between one and another. And realise that character in which alone lies the justification of human life and the gurantee of human continuity. ”

“ LESSON XVII. IDEALS DEVELOPED BY CONCENTRATION Through our paltry stir and strife, Glows the wished Ideal, And longing molds in clay, what life Carves in the marble real.—Lowell.
We often hear people spoken of as idealists. The fact is we are all idealists to a certain extent, and upon the ideals we picture depends our ultimate success. You must have the mental image if you are to produce the material thing. Everything is first created in the mind. When you control your thoughts you become a creator. You receive divine ideas and shape them to your individual needs. ”

“ Whether in our acts or our emotions shall we give idealism this range, and deny it to literature which discloses the habits of our daily practice in more perfection and with greater beauty? There we find the purest types to raise and sustain us; to direct our choice, and reenforce us with that emotion, that passion, which most supports the will in its effort. There history itself is taken up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole past of human emotion and action contained and shown forth with convincing power. ”

“ And the shock of having to transvalue all the accepted values, of having, in a world organized on the basis of fear, to conceive of a world organized on the basis of good will, made him a thinker in his own right. ”

“ The idealists dream and the dream is told, and the practical men listen and ponder and bring back the truth and apply it to human life, and progress and growth and higher human ideals come into being and so the world moves ever on. ”

“ Now if, with this fact in mind, I look back on the world which I attempted thus to describe, I find that the limitation which experience often seems to set to my postulates about the discrimination of facts, may well be founded in the deepest nature of things. The true world, the World of Values or of Appreciation, as rightly viewed by an absolute insight, would be a world of Selves, forming in the unity of their systems One Self. ”

“ For that which the highest human nature is capable of is within the reach of human nature at large." "We gravitate towards the ideal," she writes, "and this gravitation is infinite, as is the ideal itself." ”

“ We must, however, thirdly, conceive the universal, which supplies the content of human emotion and action as self-subsistent, intrinsically complete where it is, and constituting as such in itself a definitive and exclusive world. ”

“ The facts which fulfil the meaning are at once such that no other beyond is still needed to supply a lack, while, on the other hand, no other facts could take their place without precisely a failure to fulfil the purpose. And in this twofold sense is the world of the fulfilled meaning an individual world, a world whose place no other could take. ”

“ Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, the work, the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far better than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do now the rose, and the air, and the sun. ”

“ Such, then, as best I can state it in brief and rapid strokes, is the world of art, its methods, its appeals, its significance to mankind. Idealism, so presented, is in a sense a glorification of the commonplace. Its realm lies in the common lot of men; its distinction is to embrace truth for all, and truth in its universal forms of experience and personality, the primary, elementary, equally shared fates, passions, beliefs of the race. ”

“ Thus the ideal, in this superior degree, is the manifestation of moral powers and of the ideas of spirit, of the grand movements of the soul, and of the characters which appear and are revealed in the development of the representation. ”

“ How is the ideal of a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is the life of your religious organisation as you yourself reflect it, to conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness? ”

“ Your own thoughts, desires, and aspirations comprise your world, and, to you, all that there is in the universe of beauty and joy and bliss, or of ugliness and sorrow and pain, is contained within yourself.
By your own thoughts you make or mar your life, your world, your universe, As you build within by the power of thought, so will your outward life and circumstances shape themselves accordingly. ”

“ It is the end we aim at, the object we strive for, the ideal we set before us, that gives value to what we do, and to what has been done by us and others. Now our ends, our objects, and our ideals are matters of the will, on which the will is set, and not merely matters of which we have intellectual apprehension. ”

“ And nevertheless, your future and your past, your aspect of individuality, and of freedom, and the various aspects wherein you are dependent upon the rest of the world, your whole life of deeds, and your attainment of your individual goal through your deeds, — all these manifold facts that are yours and that constitute you, are present at once to the Absolute, — as facts in the world, as temporal contents eternally viewed, — as a process eternally finished, — but eternally finished precisely by virtue of the temporal sequence of your deeds. ”

“ Passing over, after we have studied these problems, to what is properly called the Moral World, we shall, in our closing lectures, apply our general interpretation of Being to a study of the Human Self, of its Place in Being, and of the Moral Order, to a consideration of the problem of Evil, and finally to a statement of what seem to us to be the results of Idealism regarding the final relations of the Absolute and the human Individual, or in ordinary speech, of God and Man. In this connection we shall be led to state briefly our own thesis regarding Immortality. ”

“ The human mind—an important thing to say at this minute—has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real.
It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live. ”

“ Endowed with senses capable of the nicest perceptions, and with a mental and moral constitution which tended always, with the certainty of a physical law, to the beautiful, the pure, and the sublime, he led what many might call an ideal life. ”

“ We shall, perhaps to our surprise, reach the seemingly paradoxical and essentially idealistic thesis that no being in heaven or in earth, or in the waters under the earth, has power to give to an idea any purpose unless, the idea itself, as idea, as a fragment of life, as a conscious thrill, so to speak, of inner meaning, first somehow truly learns so to develope its internal meaning as to assign to itself just that specific purpose. ”

“ The initial step, then, consists in determining to picture the Universal Mind as the ideal of all we could wish it to be both to ourselves and to others, together with the endeavour to reproduce this ideal, however imperfectly, in our own life ”

“ The latter does indeed convey some moral lessons, but his main object is to portray life as he finds it, aiming ever at the ideal for which life should stand. It is for him to place before the public the different phases of human nature, the differences of character formed by circumstances, the influences of fate or the rules and laws of Society, all of which are again controlled by the laws of the Universe. ”