The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never absent from any
intellectual period, is active on all sides, and in more than one
quarter passes into denial. Literature and the other arts of expression
suffer throughout the world. To that point is it come that those of the
old stock who believe that the imagination exercises man's faculty at
its highest pitch, and that the method of idealism is its law, are bid
step down, while others more newly grounded in what belongs to
literature possess the city; but seeing the shrines interdicted, the
obliteration of ancient names, the heroes' statues thrown down, shall
we learn what our predecessors never knew--to abdicate and abandon? I
hear in the temples the footsteps of the departing gods--
Di quibus imperium hoc steterat;
but no; for our opponents are worse off than those of whom it was said
that though one rose from the dead they would not believe,--Plato, being
dead, yet speaks, Shakspere treads our boards, and (why should I
hesitate?) Tennyson yet breathes among us though already immortal. That
which convinced the master minds of antiquity and many in later ages is
still convincing, if it be attended to; the old tradition is yet
unbroken; therefore, because I was bred in this faith, I will try to set
forth anew in the phrases of our time the eternal ground of reason on
which idealism rests.
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