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 346 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

elements of the problem to be solved. Anything else, however feasible at the time it may appear, must turn out in the end to be impracticable. The forces of reality are leagued against it. However favorable to it the circumstances may seem to be, there is no sure footing for it in the actual world. With the concrete idea all this is reversed. Let a man but have hold of such an idea, the whole world may be against him ; in the end it will come round to him. As Emerson would have said, he has hitched his chariot to a star. He may seem to fail. He may die without seeing the fruit of his labor. But the idea lives and he may rest in peace. In such an idea he has the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

History will serve us best in illustration. It exhibits abstrac- tions on a large scale. I take one or two almost at random. Every- one is familiar with the part played in the course of the French Revolution by "abstract ideas." Issuing from the brain of that prince of abstract thinkers, Jean Jacques Rousseau, they con- trolled the whole movement and had a splendid chance. Founded on the historical examples of Greece and Rome, preached with all the eloquence of the greatest prose writer of his time, dom- inating a great national uprising, accepted as the creed of the party that finally triumphed over the storm, here, if anywhere, abstract ideas might be expected to succeed. And yet it might with truth be said that not one of Rousseau's positive proposals succeeded in establishing itself as an actual institution.

Equally striking is the example of the idea that dominated the succeeding decade the idea of a French Empire founded on the ruins of national liberty in Europe. Every circumstance seemed to combine to favor its realization. Yet the whole power of the greatest military genius the world has ever seen was insufficient to establish the Napoleonic abstraction in the face of the forces that concrete reality had at its disposal to oppose it. These ideas failed because they did not correspond to the actual wants of the time. They were not in the line of actual progress. There was no place for them in the moral order that was then on the point of establishing itself among the nations of Europe.