Again, idealism respects the intellect. The great development of the physical sciences, generally considered the most striking fact in nineteenth century history, is the necessary result of an idealistic faith in the powers of human observation and reason. The modern mind, believing in its own ability to interrogate nature, has done so with tireless energy, recording the answers obtained in half a hundred special “sciences,” ranging from histology to psychology. It has applied the same method introspectively to such good purpose that metaphysics, in the hands of Kant and his successors, has radically altered our conception of how we know truth, and what sort of truth it is that we know. Nor have the contributions of the enfranchised intellect stopped with philosophy; they have immensely deepened and vivified religion. The doctrine of evolution, for example, a product of the most remarkable keenness, liberality, and patience in intellectual research, has substituted for the childish anthropomorphic doctrine of creation the wondrously vital modern conception of a God not remote and detached, but nearer than thought and more enveloping than the atmosphere, incarnate in every atom and regnant in every mind. The emotional or spiritual essence in man is as much respected by idealism as his body and his intellect. Loyalty to actual feelings as they well up spontaneously in the heart, rather than mere conformity to custom, is the modern attitude in all spheres of voluntary life. Personal conduct is a truer mirror of individual feeling than it used to be. What a contrast the student of literature observes between the conventional worldliness of eighteenth-century manners and morals and the intense individualism of the early nineteenth-century poets in England and of our own transcendentalist writers--an individualism which was the logical outcome of the idealist’s championship of human emotion in and for itself. The greatest men are of course always ahead of their age, but such sturdy, independent lives as Thoreau’s, Whitman’s, Darwin’s, George Eliot’s, Stevenson’s, would have created even more consternation in the eighteenth century than they did in the nineteenth, dimly stirred to freer ideals. The same regard for emotional verities that has so deepened individual life is producing a revolution in all social relations. They are constantly becoming more spontaneous and genuine--less matters of tradition. Class boundaries are being obliterated, a man’s success and position coming to depend less on family and station, more on the man himself. Women’s economic progress, combined with an increasing sense in both women and men of the real sacredness and responsibility of love between the sexes, is making marriage, in many ways the most vital of all social relations, a free and joyful bond between equals, rather than a yoke imposed by egotism and endured by helplessness. In sum, the democratic ideal is