Life and the Ideal

These essays are based on the view that every form of life contains its separate ideal; in other words, that in all departments of it there is a something better than we have yet seen or reached. And they are a search for that ideal. The best thing about our universe is that it is an unfinished one; and that we, in our several positions, are called in as co-workers in the finishing of it. In business, in politics, in our social systems; in religion, as it exists in our forms and beliefs, there is a something yet to be attained, an eternal progress which we are to help in realizing. We can never do our best work except in fidelity not only to what is, but to what is yet to be. The topics discussed are various as life is various, but they will be found to be united in this common conception.