ideal; in the ideal, not only as vaguely rendered in the visions of poetry or the solemnities of religion, but far more as framed into organic epics of the mind, and turned upon action with all the force of systems, by metaphysical invention. Nor let it be supposed that our knowledge of the purely poetic character of speculation will paralyse its power over conduct. Though void of literal truth, its ethical truth is real; the conduct that it means is absolutely right. “A noble man,” to borrow Lange’s own words, “is not the least disturbed in his zeal for his ideals, though he be and must be told, and tells himself, that his ideal world, with all its settings of a God, immortal hopes, and eternal truths, is a mere imagination and no reality; these are all real for life, just because they are psychic ideals; they exist in the soul of man, and woe to him who casts doubt upon their power!”
Having thus cleared up the “Standpoint of the Ideal,” Lange next turns to the view it affords of practical philosophy. He touches first upon the question of the worth of life, where his settlement is this: Neither pessimism nor optimism is an absolute truth; the problem of evil, if we push for its radical solution, belongs to the transcendent world, of which we can know nothing. But applied to the world of experience, the doctrine of the Ideal gives an optimistic or pessimistic result, according as
