If the swift retort should come, from those who think the present the only era of attainment and the physical world the only source of wisdom, that the past is full of villainies, of lapses from high standards, one can but say that for ethical purposes our study should be frankly a selective study, emphasizing the fine and high, subordinating the evil. There is no hypocrisy in such selection; there is deliberate choice of the higher upon which to dwell, as a formative power, quickening feeling and imagination. I have heard it said that a woman, by resolute dwelling on things noble and pure, may shape the inner nature of her unborn child, and I have faith to believe it. Even so should the nation yet to be be shaped by resolute dwelling on the good. It was not all cowardice, as many a present writer thinks, that led the mothers of earlier days to say little to their sons and daughters regarding evil things, and much regarding right things. Doubtless greater frankness would have been better, yet I doubt if our protracted dwelling on the evil will produce better results.
Should any one object that this emphasis on the good means suppression of the truth, we can but reply that, for the rational soul, the truth is not necessarily the mechanically worked-out sum of all the facts. That we have forgotten the distinction between fact--that which has indeed come to pass, but which may be momentary--and truth, which endures, is one of the many signs of what William Sharp calls the 'spiritual degradation' of our time. Much of our modern thinking and teaching, much of our realistic fiction, rests upon a failure to make the distinction; much that is indisputable in individual instances of wrong-doing may be, thank God! false in the long run.
'That is not true, scientifically true,' we hear often in regard to some fine hope or aspiration of the race; but in the real import of the term there is no such thing as scientific truth. It is a pity that a word of such profound and distinctive meaning should come to be more and more exclusively identified with the observation of physical phenomena, and the formulation of physical laws, whereas the very root-meaning of the word true, from Anglo-Saxon _treowe_, signifying faithful, gives justification for the idealist's belief that vital truth is partly a matter of the will, not of mere perception and of intellectual deductions drawn therefrom. We have need of deeper truth than that of mere fact; and the truth that shall set us free is a truth of choice, of selection; it embraces that part of human thought and human experience which is worth keeping.