The saying of Goethe that "The most unnatural action is yet natural," is a noble suggestion of tolerance; but human judgment can scarcely go to the length of Madame de Stael's opinion, when she claims that "To understand all actions is to pardon all." We must brush away the sophisms which insist that all standards are merely relative, and that time and place alone decide on right and wrong. Were that so, not only all morality, but all science and all knowledge were fluctuating as sand. But it is not so. The principles of Reason, Truth, Justice and Love have been, are, and ever will be the same. Time and place, race and culture, make no difference. Whenever a country is engaged in the diffusion of these immortal verities, whenever institutions are calculated to foster and extend them, that country, those institutions, take noble precedence over all others whose efforts are directed to lower aims.[15-1] Something else remains. When the ethnologist has acquired a competent knowledge of his facts, and deduced from them a clear conception of the mental states of the peoples he is studying, he has not finished his labors. Institutions and arts in some degree reflect the mental conditions of a people, in some degree bring them about; but the underlying source of both is something still more immaterial and intangible, yet more potent, to wit, Ideas and Ideals. These are the primary impulses of conscious human endeavor, and it is vain to attempt to understand ethnology or to write history without assigning their consideration the first place in the narration. I am anxious to avoid here any metaphysical obscurity. My assertion is, that the chief impulses of nations and peoples are abstract ideas and ideals, unreal and unrealizable; and that it is in pursuit of these that the great as well as the small movements on the arena of national life and on the stage of history have taken place. You are doubtless aware that this is no new discovery of mine. Early in this century Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote: "The last and highest duty of the historian is to portray the effort of the Idea to attain realization in fact;" and the most recent lecture on the philosophy of history which I have read, that by Lord Acton, contains this maxim: "Ideas which in religion and politics are truths, in history are living forces." I do claim that it is timely for me to repeat these doctrines and to urge them with vehemence, for they are generally repudiated by the prevailing schools of ethnology and history in favor of the opinion that objective, mechanical influences alone suffice to explain all the phenomena of human life. This I pronounce an inadequate and an unscientific opinion.