In short, the reality of progress is a matter of faith, not of demonstration. We find ourselves in the midst of an onward movement of which our own spirits are a part, and most of us are glad to be in it, and to ascribe to it all the good we can conceive or divine. This seems the brave thing to do, the hopeful, animating thing, the only thing that makes life worth while, but it is an act rather of faith than of mere intelligence. I hold, then, that progress, like human life in every aspect, is essentially tentative, that we work it out as we go along, and always must; that it is a process rather than an attainment. The best is forever indefinable; it is growth, renewal, onwardness, hope. The higher life seems to be an upward struggle toward a good which we can never secure, but of which we have glimpses in a hundred forms of love and joy. In childhood, music, poetry, in transient hours of vision, we know a fuller, richer life of which we are a part, but which we can grasp only in this dim and flitting way. All history is a reaching out for, a slow, partial realization of, such perceptions. The thing for us is to believe in the reality of this larger life, seen or unseen, to cling to all persons and activities that help to draw us into it, to trust that though our individual hold upon it relax with age and be lost, yet the great Whole, from which we are in some way inseparable, lives on in growing splendor. _I_ may perish, but _We_ are immortal. I look with wonder and reverence upon the great spirits of the past and upon the expression of human nature in countless forms of art and aspiration. It seems to me that back of all this must be a greater Life, high and glorious beyond my imagination, which is trying to work itself out through us. But this is in the nature of religion, and I do not expect to impose it upon others by argument. As regards the proximate future I see little to justify any form of facile optimism, but conceive that, though the world does move, it moves slowly, and seldom in just the direction we hope. There is something rank and groping about human life, like the growth of plants in the dark: if you peer intently into it you can make out weird shapes, the expression of forces as yet inchoate and obscure; but the growth is toward the light. CHAPTER XXXV ART AND SOCIAL IDEALISM ART AS JOYOUS SELF-EXPRESSION—IT DISENGAGES THE IDEAL—ENLARGES SYMPATHY—THE KINSHIP OF ART AND DEMOCRACY—ART AND LEISURE—DEMOCRATIC ART—ART AND SPECIALIZATION—COMMUNITY IDEALS—THE MERGING OF SOCIAL IDEALS IN RELIGIOUS