Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/34

 from unremembered and unexpected sources—sources that were thought to be exhausted or barren. The ideals of Greece, of Rome, of the Orient, the ideals even of primitive man, come back to us, in the eternal cycle of the spirit, to leaven our own. They often surprise us in moments of depression or exaltation, in our silences, in our subliminal spells, even in our daily grind. Out of the vague, even vagrant conceptions of the mind an ideal slowly evolves, assumes definite shape and form. Error-bound but truth-directed, we are constantly moving to a certain goal in its unfolding infinitudes. Its fiat is universal, despite its apparent failures. The grocer as well as the poet, at one time or another, must recognize and accept its circulating medium. Whether they squander it or save it or invest it—whether they profit by it or not—is another question. But they are idealists in that they are both dissatisfied with its purchasing power. We are all idealists in that we are ever discontented with the