Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/125

 SENTIMENTS AND IDEALS IO7

embody very distinct and vivid concepts with comparatively weak feelings; or very hazy concepts with very powerful emotions. I do not mean to imply by this form of state ment that the intensities of the intellectual and emotional factors are necessarily in inverse ratio. That may be so, and I suspect that the tendency is that way ; but we are not justified in claiming that it always is and must be so. The point insisted on is that these factors may vary with respect to one s different ideals and with respect to the same ideal at different times. It is obvious, too, that they vary with the temperamental peculiarities of different persons. In some persons the intellectual factors are predominant in all mental processes, and in others the emotional factors. Perhaps it is for this reason that idealists and reformers usually divide into two classes : those who are chiefly inter ested in formulating the concepts or ideas, and those who mainly devote their energies to striving for their actual embodiment i.e., the intellectualists and the emotionalists. But it is important to bear in mind that both factors are always present in some proportion.

2. An ideal is either a pure product of the constructive imagination, without any objective reality corresponding to it, or an image of an objective fact which actually embodies the highest conception one can form of that type of reality ; that is, it may be a realized or an unrealized ideal. But like all constructions of the imagination, the unrealized ideal is based upon experience. The elements of which it is con structed are found in the ideas of actual things. The un realized ideal of a horse or a house is necessarily fashioned on the basis of one s knowledge of real horses or houses; and one s social Utopia is based upon his acquaintance with actual social facts. Inevitably, therefore, our experience conditions and limits the formation of our ideals. This is true because our ideas the intellectual factors of our ideals are the products of experience, and can have no other origin. It is impossible for the child to have the same ideal in its intellectual factors as the adult; for one gen-

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