Idealism is, in essence, a belief in the possibility of attaining the divine through a selective manipulation of the actual. In the respect it pays to finite life lies its sharp contrast with mysticism. It has gone far to obliterate the breach between the actual and the divine which the mystic had made so wide; it has tried to find the eternal in the temporal, and to nourish the spirit by guiding and developing, rather than by mortifying, the flesh.[15] Mysticism spurned the “this,” the “here,” the “now;” idealism, on the contrary, is on its hither side, so to speak, identical with realism. The idealist believes in the immediate, and loves the finite, as much as the crassest realist. He finds in it the point of departure of all desirable truths, the scaffolding for all mansions of the spirit. But he differs from the realist in that he does not stop with the real, but, using it as material for idealism, selects from it the elements of his heart’s desire. The actual world is to him a sort of keyboard on which he strikes those chords, and those only, which he wishes to hear. He is, indeed, an artist in life, and his method is the true artistic method of selection and synthesis. But on the other hand, he differs even more radically from the mystic, in that he makes the very materials of his Celestial City out of those earthly, momentary, and finite experiences that the latter rejects as dross. All three types of thought find themselves confronted by the opposition between actual facts and spiritual desires which is so characteristic of our world: the mystic repudiates the facts; the realist discredits the desires; the idealist sets out to win, by a selective or artistic manipulation of the facts, the satisfaction of the desires. Characteristic of idealism is therefore its respect for the actual, in all its phases. It respects, to begin with, the human body. The tendency of modern thought is towards a wise paganism in physical life, towards a substitution of hygiene for mortification, of moderation for abstinence, of the liberal conception of “mens sana in corpore sano” for the monkish ideal of a soul gradually burning up and sloughing off its tenement. Development of the body is increasingly manifesting its true relation to the spiritual enterprises of men--a relation that repression of it only obscured and distorted. The Hermit of Carmel, in the poem of that name,[16] spends his days in a painful, endless, and futile struggle to eradicate fleshly lusts; the young knight knows another sort of purity, more joyful and bountiful, the purity of the lover who remembers his beloved. Idealism, like that happy knight, remembers that it is the mission and destiny of flesh to wait on spirit.