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is impossible to feel sensation and remain still. Life pulsates, changes, accomplishes. Moved upon by life, man must be up and doing. Idealism shows him how he has been acting all along. Every belief tends to express itself in conduct. To accept an idea is to be inclined to live by it. Hence if we would alter our conduct we must change our beliefs. It is false theories that lead to our trouble. We have reacted upon impulse without question. We have accepted the judgment of others without asking if it was righteous. Then we have vainly tried to free ourselves from the results by working upon the effect. But the only remedy for error is truth.
 
Finally, the idealistic discovery leaves man as wilful or selfish as it found him. Sometimes idealism has been understood to be the rearing of a man's own mental world from within,* hence the new precept has been: Build any world you like. Now one may indeed construct any mental world one chooses. One of the greatest services of idealism is the revelation it makes in regard to the mental worlds which people project into nature. There is nothing in the fact itself that prevents a man from continuing in this course. The questions, What is ideal? What ought I to do?

*For example, see lecture on "The Romantic School," in "The Spirit of Modern Philosophy," by Prof. J. Royce, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1892.