idealism

• approaching concept of the divine

3:5.116. Is ide­al­ism—the ap­proach­ing con­cept of the di­vine—de­sir­able? Then must man strug­gle in an en­vi­ron­ment of rel­a­tive good­ness and beauty, sur­round­ings stim­u­la­tive of the ir­re­press­ible reach for bet­ter things.

• can never survive if idealists permit themselves to be exterminated

71:4.16The ap­pear­ance of gen­uine broth­er­hood sig­ni­fies that a so­cial or­der has ar­rived in which all men de­light in bear­ing one an­other’s bur­dens; they ac­tu­ally de­sire to prac­tice the golden rule. But such an ideal so­ci­ety can­not be re­al­ized when ei­ther the weak or the wicked lie in wait to take un­fair and un­holy ad­van­tage of those who are chiefly ac­tu­ated by de­vo­tion to the ser­vice of truth, beauty, and good­ness. In such a sit­u­a­tion only one course is prac­ti­cal: The “golden rulers” may es­tab­lish a pro­gres­sive so­ci­ety in which they live ac­cord­ing to their ide­als while main­tain­ing an ad­e­quate de­fense against their be­nighted fel­lows who might seek ei­ther to ex­ploit their pa­cific predilec­tions or to de­stroy their ad­vanc­ing civ­i­liza­tion.

71:4.17Ide­al­ism can never sur­vive on an evolv­ing planet if the ide­al­ists in each gen­er­a­tion per­mit them­selves to be ex­ter­mi­nated by the baser or­ders of hu­man­ity. And here is the great test of ide­al­ism: Can an ad­vanced so­ci­ety main­tain that mil­i­tary pre­pared­ness which ren­ders it se­cure from all at­tack by its war-lov­ing neigh­bors with­out yield­ing to the temp­ta­tion to em­ploy this mil­i­tary strength in of­fen­sive op­er­a­tions against other peo­ples for pur­poses of self­ish gain or na­tional ag­gran­dize­ment? Na­tional sur­vival de­mands pre­pared­ness, and re­li­gious ide­al­ism alone can pre­vent the pros­ti­tu­tion of pre­pared­ness into ag­gres­sion. Only love, broth­er­hood, can pre­vent the strong from op­press­ing the weak.

• spiritual i. is energy which advances human culture

81:6.27Ide­als el­e­vate the source of the so­cial stream. And no stream will rise any higher than its source no mat­ter what tech­nique of pres­sure or di­rec­tional con­trol may be em­ployed. The driv­ing power of even the most ma­te­rial as­pects of a cul­tural civ­i­liza­tion is res­i­dent in the least ma­te­rial of so­ci­ety’s achieve­ments. In­tel­li­gence may con­trol the mech­a­nism of civ­i­liza­tion, wis­dom may di­rect it, but spir­i­tual ide­al­ism is the en­ergy which re­ally up­lifts and ad­vances hu­man cul­ture from one level of at­tain­ment to an­other.

• not merely herd instinct

103:5.8It is fa­tal to man’s ide­al­ism when he is taught that all of his al­tru­is­tic im­pulses are merely the de­vel­op­ment of his nat­u­ral herd in­stincts. But he is en­no­bled and might­ily en­er­gized when he learns that these higher urges of his soul em­anate from the spir­i­tual forces that in­dwell his mor­tal mind.

• philosophy which inclines toward spiritual level

103:6.14When the phi­los­o­phy of man leans heav­ily to­ward the world of mat­ter, it be­comes ra­tio­nal­is­tic or nat­u­ral­is­tic. When phi­los­o­phy in­clines par­tic­u­larly to­ward the spir­i­tual level, it be­comes ide­al­is­tic or even mys­ti­cal. When phi­los­o­phy is so un­for­tu­nate as to lean upon meta­physics, it un­fail­ingly be­comes skep­ti­cal, con­fused. In past ages, most of man’s knowl­edge and in­tel­lec­tual eval­u­a­tions have fallen into one of these three dis­tor­tions of per­cep­tion. Phi­los­o­phy dare not project its in­ter­pre­ta­tions of re­al­ity in the lin­ear fash­ion of logic; it must never fail to reckon with the el­lip­tic sym­me­try of re­al­ity and with the es­sen­tial cur­va­ture of all re­la­tion con­cepts.