232 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



As all will allow, ideals are absolutely indispensable to 

 progress and always safe, provided they are kept growing. 

 Like all biological things, live ideals originate by germination, 

 and their growth is subject to no limit except in mental petri- 

 faction. Growth and adaptability are as natural and necessary 

 to them as to living organisms. Here we have, then, an unfailing 

 test for the soundness or relative merit of ideals. Seeds may 

 be kept for years without sensible change or loss of power to 

 germinate. But it is because they are kept, not planted and 

 cultivated. Once planted, they must grow or rot. So it is 

 with ideals. The unchanged ideal that we sometimes hear 

 boasted of is at best but a dormant germ, not a plant with 

 roots and branches in functional activity. If an ideal stands 

 for anything which is growing and developing, then it must 

 also grow, or be supplanted by one that will grow. It is easy, 

 of course, to conceive of ideals a hundred years or more ahead 

 of possible realization; but such ideals could have no vital con- 

 nection with present needs, and long before the time of possible 

 realization, they would cease to be the best, even if the best 

 conceivable at the start. 



We are here, then, concerned only with ideals rooted in 

 experience and continually expanding above and in advance of 

 experience. The moment growth ceases, that moment the 

 work of the ideal is done. Something fails at the roots, and 

 you have waste mental timber to be cleared away as soon as 

 possible to make room for the new seed. 



Let us here take warning of one danger to which we are all 

 liable, the danger of adopting ideals and adhering to them 

 as finalities, forgetting that progress in the model is not only 

 possible, but essential to progress in achievement. The danger 

 is all the greater in the case of ideals lying outside our special 

 field of work, which we are unable to test and improve by 

 our own efforts. The head may thus become stored with a 

 lot of fixed mental furniture, and the possessor become the 

 victim of an illusion, from the charms of which it is difficult 

 to disenchant him. He falls into admiration of his furniture, 

 taking most pride in its unchangeableness. It was, perhaps, the 

 best to be found in the market at the time of installment, and 



