Yet there are persons who keep the requirements of life strained up always at concert pitch, and are thus worn out and made miserable all their days by the grating of a perpetual discord. There is a faculty of the human mind to which phrenologists have given the name of _Ideality_, which is at the foundation of this exactingness. Ideality is the faculty by which we conceive of and long for perfection; and at a glance it will be seen, that, so far from being an evil ingredient of human nature, it is the one element of progress that distinguishes man’s nature from that of the brute. While animals go on from generation to generation, learning nothing and forgetting nothing, practising their small circle of the arts of life no better and no worse from year to year, man is driven by ideality to constant invention and alteration, whence come arts, sciences, and the whole progress of society. Ideality induces discontent with present attainments, possessions, and performances, and hence come better and better ones. So in morals, ideality constantly incites to higher and nobler modes of living and thinking, and is the faculty to which the most effective teachings of the great Master of Christianity are addressed. To be dissatisfied with present attainments, with earthly things and scenes, to aspire and press on to something forever fair, yet forever receding before our steps,--this is the teaching of Christianity, and the work of the Christian. But every faculty has its own instinctive, wild growth, which, like the spontaneous produce of the earth, is crude and weedy. Revenge, says Lord Bacon, is a sort of wild justice, obstinacy is untutored firmness,--and so exactingness is untrained ideality; and a vast deal of misery, social and domestic, comes, not of the faculty, but of its untrained exercise. The faculty which is ever conceiving and desiring something better and more perfect must be modified in its action by good sense, patience, and conscience, or it induces a morbid, discontented spirit, which courses through the veins of individual and family life like a subtle poison. In a certain neighborhood are two families whose social and domestic _animus_ illustrates the difference between ideality and the want of it. The Daytons are a large, easy-natured, joyous race, hospitable, kindly, and friendly. Nothing about their establishment is much above mediocrity. The grounds are tolerably kept, the table is tolerably fair, the servants moderately good, and the family character and attainments of the same average level. Mrs. Dayton is a decent housekeeper, and so her bread be not sour, her butter not frowy, the food abundant, and the table-cloth and dishes clean, she troubles her head little with the niceties and refinements of the _ménage_.