Conduct is the pons asinorum of life.  Wise men somehow cross it, though stumblingly, and with tears.  Fools, usurers, oppressors, and spendthrifts of life are left gaping and wrangling on the hellward side.  Thinkers have always been climbing up on each other’s shoulders to look over into the Beyond.  What they have seen, they have told.  Some men climb so high into the ethereal places of the Ideal, that they do not get down again.  They are the impractical men.  An impractical man is not necessarily the educated man; he is the man at the top of some intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly forgotten that he has legs.  The legs are not absent, but his wit is.  So with the impractical man in every sphere.  Education has not really removed his common-sense, as some say, his power to connect passing events with their causes, and to act reasonably; but it has set his thought on some other thought for the time being, and the dinner-bell, we will say, does not detach him from his inquiry.  His necktie rides up!  He goes out into the street without a hat!  Let him alone till he proves the worth of what he is about.  The practical man, who hears the dinner-bell and prides himself upon this fact, may not hear sounds far-off and clear, that ring in the impractical man’s ear, and that may sometime tell him how to make a better dinner-bell, or provide a better dinner—­a great social philosophy—­for the race!

The really impractical man is not he who reaches out to the intellectual and ideal aspects of life; it is he who lives as if this life were all.  There are women who make pets of their clothes, as men make pets of horse or dog.  They have just time enough in life to dress themselves up.  Looking back over their years, they can only say, I have had clothes!  In the same number of years, with no greater advantages or opportunities, other women have become the queenly women of the race.  Some women are girt with centuries, instead of gold or gems.  Whenever they appear, the event becomes historic; what they do adds new lustre to life.

We are all prodigals.  We throw away time and strength, and years, and gold, and then weep that we are ignorant, and embeggared at the last.  Who shall teach us wisdom, and in what manner may we be wise?

What say the sages of the vast possibilities of the race?  With one voice they say:  Be brave!  Do not cower, shrink, or whine.  Throw out upon the world a free fearlessness of thought and word and deed.  Courage, freedom, heroism, faith, exactness, honor, justice, and mercy—­these traits have been handed down as the traditional learning of the heart of man.

Another ideal of the race is Law.  We have given up a chaos-philosophy—­the haphazard continuity of events—­a cometary orbit, for the world.  There are fixed relations everywhere existent:  the succession of cycles is orderly and prearranged.