Renan’s aristocratic idealism recognized, even from the point of view of the moral interest of the race and its future spiritual development, the import of the utilitarian labour of this century; “To get away from need is to redeem oneself.” In the remote past even the prosaic and selfish activities of the merchant resulted in putting for the first time a people in relation with others, and thus had a far-reaching effect on men’s ideas; since this had much to do with multiplying the means of intelligence, refining and softening manners, perhaps even showing the way to a more advanced morality; and the same positive force appears later, favouring the higher ideals of civilization. It was the gold accumulated by the merchants of the Italian republics that paid, says Saint-Victor, for the works of the Renaissance. The ships that came back from the countries of the Thousand and One Nights, laden with ivory and spices, made it possible for Lorenzo di Medici to renew in Florentine merchants’ houses the feast of Plato. All history shows a definite relation of growth between the progress of utilitarian activity and the ideal. And just as the former can be turned into a shelter and protection for the latter, so the ideas of the mind often give rise to utilitarian results, above all when these latter are not sought directly. For instance, Bagehot remarks that the immense positive benefits of navigation might never have been attained for humanity if in earliest times there had not been dreamers, apparently idle — and certainly misunderstood by their contemporaries — who were interested solely in the contemplation of the movements of the stars.

This law of harmony bids us also respect the arm that labours arduously in what seems a barren and prosaic soil. The work of North American positivism will also at the end serve the cause of Ariel. That which this people of Cyclops have achieved for the direct purpose of material advantage, with all their sense for what is useful and their admirable faculty of mechanical invention, will be converted by other peoples, or later, even by themselves, to a wealth of material for the higher selection. Thus that most precious and fundamental invention of the alphabet, which gives the wings of immortality to the spoken word, originated in Phoenician shops, the discovery of merchants who only desired to keep their accounts. Using it for purposes merely mercenary, they never dreamed that the genius of a superior race would transfigure and transform it to a means of perpetuating the light and the learning of their own being. The relation between material good and good that is intellectual or moral is thus only a new aspect of that modem doctrine which we call the transformation of energy; material wellbeing may be transformed into spiritual superiority.

But North American life does not as yet offer us any new example of this indiscutable relation, nor even dimly suggest it as the triumph of the generation to come.

Our wish and our belief, indeed, incline us to hope that a superior destiny may be reserved for that civilization in a time not too remote for prophecy; the more that, under the spur of their energy, even the brief time that separates them from their dawn has sufficed to satisfy the expenditure of the vitality required for such immense achievement. Their past, their present, must be but the entry-way to a great future. Yet all shows that this is still far away from its definitive. The assimilative energy which has so far enabled them to maintain a certain uniformity as well as some touch of genius, despite the enormous inrush of ethnic elements opposed to those which have so far made the basis of their character, will have to do battle every day more strenuous, and in their utilitarianism, which proscribes all ideality, will find no inspiration sufficiently strong to maintain their solidarity with the older ideal. The illustrious thinker, who compared the slave of olden times to an atom outside the attraction of the social orbit, might well use the same comparison to characterize that numerous colony of German origin now peopling the Middle and Northern West, which preserves intact in their nature, their society, and their customs, the impression of that German spirit which in many of its profoundest and strongest characteristics must be considered as the actual antithesis of the American... And also, a civilization which is destined to survive and spread throughout the world; which has not mummified itself in the manner of the Chinese by losing all capability of change; cannot indefinitely prolong the direction of its energies to one order of things alone. Let us hope, then, that the spirit of that Titanic organism, which has so far been utility and will-power only, may some day also be intelligence, sentiment, ideality; that from that mighty forge may arise, in last result, the noble human figure, harmonious, select, that Spencer foreshadowed in the discourse I have adverted to. But we may not look for him in the present reality of that people, nor in their immediate future; and we must give up hoping to find the perfect type of an exemplary civilization in what is now but a rough sketch, huge and misshapen, having to pass through many correcting hands before it assumes the serene, the perfect shape of a people that have fully developed their genius and contemplate their work, finis coronat, gloriously crowned. So, in his “Dream of the Condor,” Leconte de Lisle depicts the ascension on strong wings and at last the Olympian tranquillity far above the snowpeaks of the Cordilleras!

Before posterity, before history, every great people ought to appear as a growth whose harmonious development has produced a fruit whose fine essence offers to the future the fragrance of its ideality and a fecund seed. Without this durable, human result, raised above the transitory end of the immediately useful, the power and grandeur of empires are but as dreams of a night in the existence of man, to be unheeded, uncounted in the doings of the day which weave the world’s destiny. A great civilization, a great people, in the eye of history, is that which after its time has passed still leaves the chords of its memory vibrating, its spirit a lasting legacy to posterity, a new and divine portion of the sum of things. So Carlyle said of the souls of his heroes. So when Helena, in Goethe’s poem, called from the realms of night, returns again to the shades, she leaves to Faust her tunic and her veil; the vestments are not herself, but as she has worn them, they breathe of her divineness and possess ever a spell to elevate the soul of him who keeps them above all vulgar things.

An organized society which limits its idea of civilization to the accumulation of material abundance, and of justice to their equitable distribution among its members, will never make of its great cities anything that differs essentially from the heaping-up of anthills. Populous, opulent cities do not suffice to make a civilization immutable, intensive; they are, indeed, necessary for the highest culture, are its natural atmosphere; the soul of the great man can rarely grow from amid the petty interests of small towns; but this quantitative side of a nation’s greatness, like the size of its armies, is but means, not results. Of the stones of Carthage not one remains to bear any message of light, and all the immensity of Babylon or Nineveh does not fill in human memory the hollow of man’s hand as compared with the few furlongs that lie between the Acropolis and the Piraeus. In the perspective of the ideal no city appears great, though it occupy all the space around the towers of Nimrod, nor strong because it can build again those Babylonian walls which carried six chariots abreast; nor beautiful because it was paved with flagstones of alabaster and girt with the gardens of Semiramis.... No. In this view that city only is great whose spirit’s barriers extend far beyond the mountains or the seas, whose very name pronounced illuminates for posterity an epoch of human thought, a horizon of history. It is strong and lovely when its days are something more than the invariable repetition of the same echo, repeated in never-ending circle; when in it there is something which floats above the faces of the crowd; when amid its night lights there are the lamps which light the solitude of vigils devoted only to thought; thoughts whence germinate ideas which are to come to the sunlight of the coming day with a cry to humanity, a force that shall compel men’s souls.

Then only may the extent and material greatness of the city measure the intensity of its civilization. Royal capitals, avenues of proud palaces, are a narrower home than the desert for man’s thinking when it is not thought that overlords them.