* * * * *

But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to be reaching a confused result.  I seem to be just taking things up and dropping them again.  First I took up Chautauqua, and dropped that; then Tolstoi and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, I took up ideals, and seem now almost dropping those.  But please observe in what sense it is that I drop them.  It is when they pretend singly to redeem life from insignificance.  Culture and refinement all alone are not enough to do so.  Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will.  But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone.  There must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.

Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion.  But in a question of significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise.  The answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a balance struck by sympathy, insight, and good will.  But it is an answer, all the same, a real conclusion.  And, in the course of getting it, it seems to me that our eyes have been opened to many important things.  Some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you were an hour ago of the depths of worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives.  And, when you ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a rough standard for shaping your decision.  In any case, your imagination is extended.  You divine in the world about you matter for a little more humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence, and love for others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased importance of our common life.  Such joyfulness is a religious inspiration and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than large amounts of that sort of technical and accurate information which we professors are supposed to be able to impart.

To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just make one brief practical illustration and then close.

We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each and all of you be caught up in its perplexities.  I use the brief term labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents and socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which they provoke.  So far as this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable,—­and I think it is so only to a limited extent,—­the unhealthiness consists solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other half.  They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral virtue,