The specific question concerns literature and its method, but its import
is not mainly literary. Life is the matter of literature; and thence it
comes that all leading inquiries to which literature gives rise probe
for their premises to the roots of our being and expand in their issues
to the unknown limits of human fate. It is an error to think of idealism
as a thing remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial. It enters intimately
into the lives of all men, however humble and unlearned, if they live at
all except in their bodies. What is here proposed is neither
speculative, technical, nor abstruse; it is practical in matter,
universal in interest, and touches upon those things which men most
should heed. I fear rather to incur the reproach of uttering truisms
than paradoxes. But he does ill who is scornful of the trite. To be
learned in commonplaces is no mean education. They make up the great
body of the people's knowledge. They are the living words upon the lips
of men from generation to generation; the real winged words; the matter
of the unceasing reiteration of families, schools, pulpits, libraries;
the tradition of mankind.
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