And the consecration of thought to transcendent
ideals is responsible for poets and seers. The ma-
terialist is a man of material ideals and holds an ideal
of himself as a thing of atoms, — of flesh and bones;
his materialism is the outcome of this ideal of him-
self and of the universe. Men are influenced directly
by that which they believe and not by what they
would like to believe. We become optimists or pes-
simists according to the harmony or inharmony of
our own minds. This, namely, that we work from
ideals to externals, — specifically, that ideals are
externalized in the body— is the psychology of the
ideal, the pradlical aspedl which distinguishes mod-
em idealism. It is not the soul which grows but
our realization of it merely, and it is this that con-
stitutes development. Growth is the process of un-
covering and bringing to light that which is, rather
than any accretion from without. This process of
discovering hidden truth — of uncovering the Soul —
may be likened to a journey through well nigh im-
penetrable forests, seeing at rare intervals a fitful
glimpse of the overarching blue, and plunging again
into abysmal depths. And to us there come at times,
as to Siegfried, the oflPspring of Wotan, strains of a
sublime motive, awakening knowledge of the Soul's
greatness, — intimations of a divine lineage.
