The true Idealist has his feet firmly planted on reality, and his idealism discloses itself not in a disposition to dream dreams and see visions, but in the largeness of a vision which sees realities in the totality of their relations and not merely in their obvious and superficial relations.  It is a great mistake to discern in men nothing more substantial than that movement of hopes and longings which is so often mistaken for aspiration; it is equally a mistake to discern in men nothing more enduring and aspiring than the animal nature; either report, standing by itself, would be fundamentally untrue.  Man is an animal; but he is an animal with a soul, and the sane view of him takes both body and soul into account.  The defect of a good deal of current Realism lies in its lack of veracity; it is essentially untrue, and it is, therefore, fundamentally unreal.  The love of truth, the passion for the fact, the determination to follow life wherever life leads, are noble, artistic instincts, and have borne noble fruit; but what is often called Realism has suffered quite as much as Idealism from weak practitioners, and stands quite as much in need of rectification and restatement.

The essence of Idealism is the application of the imagination to realities; it is not a play of fancy, a golden vision arbitrarily projected upon the clouds and treated as if it had an objective existence.  Goethe, who had such a vigorous hold upon the realities of existence, and who had also an artist’s horror of mere abstractions, touched the heart of the matter when he defined the Ideal as the completion of the real.  In this simple but luminous statement he condensed the faith and practice not only of the greater artists of every age, but of the greater thinkers as well.  In the order of life there can be no real break between things as they now exist and things as they will exist in the remotest future; the future cannot contradict the present, nor falsify it; for the future must be the realisation of the full possibilities of the present.  The present is related to it as the seed is related to the flower and fruit in which its development culminates.  There are vast changes of form and dimension between the seed and the tree hanging ripe with fruit, but there is no contradiction between the germ and its final unfolding.

A rigid Realism, however, sees in the seed nothing but its present hardness, littleness, ugliness; a true and rational Idealism sees all these things, but it sees also not only appearances but potentialities; or, to recall another of Goethe’s phrases, it sees the object whole.