Page:Philosophical Review Volume 29.djvu/541

No. 6.] deprecates. The interest of mental participation is not the interest of active participation. I may retain a fondness for concerts, and still regret that I was unable to carry on my music; a sympathy for literary, or political, or benevolent enterprises no more fully satisfies my suppressed ambitions along such lines, than a sympathy for lovers is a substitute for marriage.

Of course it is so that by taking the matter firmly in hand, and making it the one business of his life to secure for himself a fully rounded development, a man may come indefinitely closer to the goal, even if it remains in strictness unattainable. This stands as one of the accredited human ideals. But it very certainly would not be generally accepted as the one ideal by which all others are to be tested. Indeed it has plain deficiencies of its own. It can be lived most successfully, to speak in terms of paradox, when the full life is itself the expression of a narrow and special interest. Goethe is likely to remain for some time the best exemplar of the type; and we may tolerate in a man like Goethe what in the mere dilettante we should cordially detest, because after all Goethe is always the workman, the artist. He is not living simply for the sake of his own beautiful life, but to utilize the results of experience for literary purposes; it is his literary specialization which excuses, in so far as it does excuse, the sentimentalisms of the 'full life.' But even in Goethe the ideal does not stand the test of reflective appreciation. Self-realization is after all self-centered, and therefore petty when we put it alongside the bigger world. "Very early," writes Margaret Fuller of herself, "I knew that the only object in life was to grow." To grow is certainly highly to be desired. But to make the inner process of growth itself the professed object of our ambition is precisely the dubious point in the ideal. It assumes that the most interesting thing in the universe is oneself—a natural supposition which experience may be expected to dispose us to find questionable. There is a vast difference between taking a wide interest in things because they are interesting, and taking a wide interest because the interests are ours, and what we have in view is to develop our capacities. The last motive is quite proper as a secondary motive, which serves