accordant free-agents, not by any efficient causation, but by the operation of what has been called, since Aristotle, final causation—the attraction of an Ideal Vision, the vision of that City of God which they constitute, and in which, reciprocally, they have their being; a vision immortalised by Dante as the Vision Beatific, by which no one is driven, but by which, to borrow the meaning of Goethe’s famous line, the Eternal, womanlike, draws us onward,—
“Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.”
Now, it is greatly worth your notice, that this ideal is not merely the passing vision or phrased fancy of some poet, nor of some group of human beings in an accidental mood of rapt imagination. On the contrary, it is a great and solid matter of fact, of no less compass of reality than to deserve and require the name of historic. It constitutes the key-conception of historical progress, and is the very life of that highest stage of this which we designate and praise by the name of Western Civilisation. It is at the mental summons of this ideal, that the West as a stadium in historic progress emerges from the hoary and impassive East; and the entire history of the West as divergent from the oriental spirit, as the scene of energetic human improvement, the scene of the victory of man over Nature and over his merely natural self, has its controlling and explanatory motive in this ideal alone. It is the very life-blood of that more vigorous moral order which is the manifest distinction of the West from the Orient. Personal responsibility and its correlate of free reality, or real
