Idealization, of this or any other sort, is not to be thought of as sharply marked off from experience and memory. It seems probable that the mind is never indifferent to the elements presented to it, but that its very nature is to select, arrange, harmonize, idealize. That is, the whole is always acting upon the parts, tending to make them one with itself. What we call distinctively an ideal is only a relatively complex and finished product of this activity. The past, as it lives in our minds, is never a mere repetition of old experience, but is always colored by our present feeling, is always idealized in some sense; and it is the same with our anticipation of the future, so that to wholesome thought expectation is hope. Thus the mind is ever an artist, re-creating things in a manner congenial to itself, and special arts are only a more deliberate expression of a general tendency. An ideal, then, is a somewhat definite and felicitous product of imagination, a harmonious and congenial reconstruction of the elements of experience. And a personal ideal is such a harmonious and congenial reconstruction of our experience of persons. Its active function is to symbolize and define the desirable, and by so doing to make it the object of definite endeavor. The ideal of goodness is only the next step beyond the good man of experience, and performs the same energizing office. Indeed, as I have already pointed out, there is no separation between actual and ideal persons, only a more or less definite connection of personal ideas with material bodies. There are all degrees of vagueness or definition in our personal ideals. They may be no more than scattered imaginings of traits which we have met in experience and felt to be worthy; or they may assume such fulness and cohesion as to be distinct ideal persons. There may even be several personal ideals; one may cherish one ideal of himself and a different one for each of his intimate friends; or his imagination may project several ideals of himself, to correspond to various phases of his development.