Such are the practical dictates of agitation. Their justification lies always with events. It may be that you must wait seven centuries for an audience, or it may be that in two years your voice will be heeded. If you are really a forerunner of better times, the times will appear and explain you. It will then turn out that your movement was the keynote of the national life. You really differed from your neighbors only in this,--that your mind had gone faster than theirs along the road all were travelling. We are all slaves of the age; we can only see such principles as society reveals. The philosophy of other ages does us little good. We repeat the old formulas and cry up the prophets; but we see no connection between the truth we know so well in print and its counterpart in real life. The moral commonplaces, as, for instance, “Honesty is the best policy,” “A single just man can influence an entire community,” “Never compromise a principle,” are social truths. They are always true, but they are only obviously true in very virtuous communities. In a vile community the influence of a just man is potent but not visible. In a perfectly virtuous era it is clear that a cheat could not drive a fraudulent trade. A seer is a man with such sharp eyes for cause and effect that he sees social truth, even under unfavorable conditions. And yet even the seers generally had auspicious weather,--that is to say, storms of moral passion. The whole race of Jews lived in fervent exaltation for generations, and revealed to their sharp-sighted prophets deep glimpses of social truth. Hence the Bible. “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country.” What happy precision! What sound generalization! But every township in Israel had its prophet, and the truth was a commonplace. All the world’s moral wisdom would turn into literal truth upon the regeneration of society. It tends to become obvious in regenerative eras. In dark ages it becomes paradox. Standards are multiplied, and makeshift theories come in,--one rule for social conduct, another for business, another for politics. Expedient supplants principle. Indeed you may gauge the degradation of an age by the multiplicity of its standards. It is the same with the fine arts. To the men that made the statues and the pictures, these things were the shortest symbols of truth, and required no explanation. In the dark ages that followed they became a mystery and a paradox. But the traditions and objects survived and had to be accounted for. An age that cannot produce them requires a philosophy of æsthetics. Thus a thousand reasons are given to explain their existence, and finally it is agreed that they are something superfluous and fictitious,--conventional lies, like poetry, like loving your neighbor.