IT is quite a common thing to hear very intelligent men speak in terms of gentle irony respecting "the impracticability of the transcendental," idealism being identified by them as the dream of the visionary. They are willing to hear the dreamers talk, ready to pronounce their concepts beautiful, but as for their part and place in the actual doing of things,—well, it is simply denied that they have any.
This patronizing kindliness and condemnation is not at all surprising to the philosophically thoughtful, for they remember the self-satisfied absorption of the age in the exploitation of material sense, the mania for money-getting which impels both great and small activities, and the thought of cash values that is so generally awakened by the query, Does it pay? The estimate of national safety and national strength is still computed even by Christian writers in terms of dreadnoughts and submarines, army corps and artillery; while the world's acclaim attends big business achievements and the princes of practical affairs, and with all such, pragmatism is merely a question of the rate of interest a given proposition or enterprise will insure!
Into all this field of thought, and it is a very large one in this twentieth century, the idealist is admitted only as an interesting innocent, a harmless curiosity. Nevertheless, how definite and convincing the witness of history to the truth of the Scripture saying, "The things that are not seen are eternal;" that philosophical idealism is not a doctrine remote from life, but is in close touch with the most practical issues; and that all the greatest monuments for human betterment have both had their beginnings in a spiritual ideal and been carried forward by those who were devoted thereto. The men who have moved the mountains of human ignorance, injustice, and limitation have all been styled "dreamers." In every instance they have broken with the seemings of material sense and initiated their world betterment in their fealty to what the world pronounced "an impractical idea."
