And yet consider, does truth always lie in the mean? There were the peasants of France ground into the very earth, denied any sort of equality with the nobles, any sort of liberty at all, hopelessly unable to fraternise with anyone. To breathe into them the breath of life, to rouse them from their deadly lethargy to a furious enthusiasm, to fill their hearts so full that they would go forward and never cease till they had won, that was the eminent necessity. The difficulties were so immense, the arms of the people so weak, the chains so rivetted into their souls that only from a furious and uncontrollable impulse could any help be obtained. If the philosopher had gone to these dry bones of men, thrashing the ponds all night to prevent the frogs annoying their seigneur by croaking, sowing for others to reap, raising up sons to be slaves, and daughters to be worse than slaves--if he had gone to them and said, "My friends, you are ground down too much; you want a little more freedom--not too much, but some; you require more equality--not complete, for the perfect state requires certain inequalities, but more than you have; you require also a modicum of fraternity," what would he have effected? That level-headed philosopher would be saying the truth doubtless, and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, as the Revolutionists understood it, were impossibilities, therefore untruths; but what would he have effected? Would his "truth" have freed the slaves, have burst their chains; have restored sunlight to a continent, as the exaggeration did? Never imagine it. It may be that in the mean lies truth, but in exaggeration lies motive power. It was in the glorious dreams, the beautiful imaginings, the surgings of the heart that arose from that war cry _Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite_, that the strength lay. There is no strength in the mean. It is the enthusiasts that make the world move. If they have been guilty of half the misery, they have achieved half the joy of the world. And therefore consider again, before you brand beliefs and the teachings and enthusiasms as untruths, because they are exaggerations, because they are unworkable as they stand. What _is_ Truth and Untruth? Is not truth also to be judged by its results? May not what is an untruth now have been a living truth then? Have we reduced truth to measure? If, therefore, this which is an exaggeration now was then a necessary revivifying truth may there not be others like it? Consider the conditions of the world into which the Buddha preached first the teaching of peace, of purity, of calm, of holiness. It was a world of unrest, of fierce striving, of savage passions, expressed to their full. It was a world wherein these were virtues worshipped to exaggeration. It was a world without balance, and to redress this balance there came the Buddha with his teaching of the rejection of all the glories of the world, the teaching of the cult of the soul, the aspiration after peace, and beauty, and rest.