This is the very heart of true morality--not to struggle, not to fight with any weapons, for one's self alone--but to struggle and to fight for the common interest, to wield the power of brain and good right arm if need be for one's family, for the ordered community of life, for the state, for moral principles, humanity, and the common good.

God is the Absolute Idea, a circle that returns upon itself, not a straight line projected indefinitely.

No generation can do another generation's work for it. What we human beings can do at most is to mark out the pathway a little clearer for the generations to come after, and put legible signboards at the points where the greatest dangers have threatened us, in the hope that our posterity will read, understand, and be warned.

The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.

Faith in the continuance and enhancement of the intrinsic values--faith in truth, in beauty, in friendship, in love and harmony of life--in short, faith in reason and the worth of spiritual life--such faith is only another name for faith in the persistence of spiritual individuality. For, I repeat, these values are real only as functions of personal experience and deed. To have faith in the permanence of intrinsic values is to assume the enduring reality of selves who know truth, feel beauty, who love and win spiritual harmony.

Immediate knowledge tells us only that God is, not what he is. But if God is not an empty Being beyond the stars, he must be present in the communion of human spirits, and, in his relation to these, he is the One Spirit who pervades reality and thought. Hence there can be no final separation between our immediate consciousness of him and our mediated knowledge of reality.

The state is the nursing mother of human culture.