Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere ideals are the cheapest things in life.  Everybody has them in some shape or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance, possibly have them on the most copious scale.  Education, enlarging as it does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new ones into view.  And your college professor, with a starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most absolutely and deeply significant of men.  Tolstoi would be completely blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off the track of truth.

But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous.  The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do you continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of the laboring man’s virtues are called into action on his part,—­no courage shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in the attempt to get them realized.  It is quite obvious that something more than the mere possession of ideals is required to make a life significant in any sense that claims the spectator’s admiration.  Inner joy, to be sure, it may have, with its ideals; but that is its own private sentimental matter.  To extort from us, outsiders as we are, with our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging recognition, it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the sterner stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the dimension of the active will, if we are to have depth, if we are to have anything cubical and solid in the way of character.

The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two different parents, either of whom alone is barren.  The ideals taken by themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty.  And let the orientalists and pessimists say what they will, the thing of deepest—­or, at any rate, of comparatively deepest—­significance in life does seem to be its character of progress, or that strange union of reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another to present.  To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call intelligence.  Not every one’s intelligence can tell which novelties are ideal.  For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the older more familiar good.  In this case character, though not significant totally, may be still significant pathetically.  So, if we are to choose which is the more essential factor of human character, the fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must side with Tolstoi, and choose that simple faithfulness to his light or darkness which any common unintellectual man can show.