The question is sometimes asked by those who devise tests of literary taste, “If you were cast upon a desert island and were allowed but one book, what book would you choose?”

If I were in such a predicament I should say to the pirate chief who was about to maroon me, “My dear sir, as this island seems, for the time being, to have been overlooked by Mr. Andrew Carnegie, I must ask the loan of a volume from your private library. And if it is convenient for you to allow me but one volume at a time, I pray that it may be the Unabridged Dictionary.”

I should choose the Unabridged Dictionary, not only because it is big, but because it is mentally filling. One has the sense of rude plenty such as one gets from looking at the huge wheat elevators in Minneapolis. Here are the harvests of innumerable fields stored up in little space. There are not only vast multitudes of words, but each word means something, and each has a history of its own, and a family relation which it is interesting to trace.

But that which I should value most on my desert island would be the opportunity of acquainting myself with the fine distinctions which are made between different human qualities. It would seem that the Aggregate Mind which made the language is much cleverer than we usually suppose. The most minute differences are infallibly registered in tell-tale words. There are not only words denoting the obvious differences between the good and the bad, the false and the true, the beautiful and the ugly, but there are words which indicate the delicate shades of goodness and truth and beauty as they are curiously blended with variable quantities of badness and falseness and ugliness. There are not only words which tell what you are, but words which tell what you think you are, and what other people think you are, and what you think they are when you discover that they are thinking that you are something which you think you are not.

In the bright lexicon of youth there is no such word as “fail,” but the dictionary makes up for this deficiency. It is particularly rich in words descriptive of our failures. As the procession of the virtues passes by, there are pseudo-virtues that tag on like the small boys who follow the circus. After Goodness come Goodiness and Goody-goodiness; we see Sanctity and Sanctimoniousness, Piety and Pietism, Grandeur and Grandiosity, Sentiment and Sentimentality. When we try to show off we invariably deceive ourselves, but usually we deceive nobody else. Everybody knows that we are showing off, and if we do it well they give us credit for that.

A scholar has a considerable amount of sound learning, and he is afraid that his fellow citizens may not fully appreciate it. So in his conversation he allows his erudition to leak out, with the intent that the stranger should say, “What a modest, learned man he is, and what a pleasure it is to meet him.” Only the stranger does not express himself in that way, but says, “What an admirable pedant he is, to be sure.” Pedantry is a well-recognized compound, two thirds sound learning and one third harmless vanity.

Sometimes on the street you see a man whom you take for an old acquaintance. You approach with outstretched hand and expectant countenance, but his stony glare of non-recognition gives you pause. The fact that he does not know you gives you time to perceive that you do not know him and have never seen him before. A superficial resemblance has deceived you. In the dictionary you may find many instances of such mistakes in the moral realm.

One of the most common of these mistakes in identity is the confusion of the Idealist and the Doctrinaire. An idealist is defined as “one who pursues and dwells upon the ideal, a seeker after the highest beauty and good.” A doctrinaire may do this also, but he is differentiated as “one who theorizes without sufficient regard for practical considerations, one who undertakes to explain things by a narrow theory or group of theories.”

The Idealist is the kind of man we need. He is not satisfied with things as they are. He is one

Whose soul sees the perfect

Which his eyes seek in vain.

If a more perfect society is to come, it must be through the efforts of persons capable of such visions. Our schools, churches, and all the institutions of a higher civilization have as their chief aim the production of just such personalities. But why are they not more successful? What becomes of the thousands of young idealists who each year set forth on the quest for the highest beauty and truth? Why do they tire so soon of the quest and sink into the ranks of the spiritually unemployed.

The answer is that many persons who set out to be idealists end by becoming doctrinaires. They identify the highest beauty and truth with their own theories. After that they make no further excursions into the unexplored regions of reality, for fear that they may discover their identification to have been incomplete.

The Doctrinaire is like a mason who has mixed his cement before he is ready to use it. When he is ready the cement has set, and he can’t use it. It sticks together, but it won’t stick to anything else. George Eliot describes such a predicament in her sketch of the Reverend Amos Barton. Mr. Barton’s plans, she says, were, like his sermons, “admirably well conceived, had the state of the case been otherwise.”

By eliminating the “state of the case,” the Doctrinaire is enabled to live the simple life—intellectually and ethically. The trouble is that it is too simple. To his mind the question, “Is it true?” is never a disturbing one, nor does it lead to a troublesome investigation of matters of fact. His definition of truth has the virtue of perfect simplicity,—"A truth is that which has got itself believed by me.” His thoughts form an exclusive club, and when a new idea applies for admission it is placed on the waiting list. A single black-ball from an old member is sufficient permanently to exclude it. When an idea is once in, it has a very pleasant time of it. All the opinions it meets with are clubable, and on good terms with one another. Whether any of them are related to any reality outside their own little circle would be a question that it would be impolite to ask. It would be like asking a correctly attired member who was punctilious in paying his club dues, whether he had also paid his tailor. To the Doctrinaire there seems something sordid and vulgar in the anxiety to make the two ends—theory and practice—meet. It seems to indicate that one is not intellectually in comfortable circumstances.

The Doctrinaire, when he has conceived certain ideals, is not content that they should be cast upon the actual world, to take their chances in the rough-and-tumble struggle for existence, proving their right to the kingdom by actually conquering it, inch by inch. He cannot endure such tedious delays. He must have the satisfaction of seeing his ideals instantly realized. The ideal life must be lived under ideal conditions. And so, for his private satisfaction, he creates for himself such a world into which he retires.

It is a world of natural law, as he understands natural law. There are no exceptions, no deviation from general principles, no shadings off, no fascinating obscurities, no rude practical jokes, no undignified by-play, no “east windows of divine surprise,” no dark unfathomable abysses. He would not allow such things. In his world the unexpected never happens. The endless chain of causation runs smoothly. Every event has a cause, and the cause is never tangled up with the effect, so that you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. He is intellectually tidy, and everything must be in its place. If something turns up for which he cannot find a place, he sends it to the junk shop.

When the Doctrinaire descends from the homogeneous world which he has constructed, into the actual world which, in the attempt to get itself made, is becoming more amazingly heterogeneous all the time, he is in high dudgeon. The existence of these varied contradictorinesses seems to him a personal affront.

It is as if a person had lived in a natural history museum, where every stuffed animal knew his place, and had his scientific name painted on the glass case. He is suddenly dropped into a tropical jungle where the animals act quite differently. The tigers won’t “stay put,” and are liable to turn up just when he doesn’t want to see them.

I should not object to his unpreparedness for the actual state of things if the Doctrinaire did not assume the airs of a superior person. He lays all the blame for the discrepancy between himself and the universe on the universe. He has the right key, only the miserable locks won’t fit it. Having formed a very clear conception of the best possible world, he looks down patronizingly upon the commonplace people who are trying to make the best out of this imperfect world. Having large possessions in Utopia, he lives the care-free life of an absentee landlord. His praise is always for the dead, or for the yet unborn; when he looks on his contemporaries he takes a gloomy view. That any great man should be now alive, he considers a preposterous assumption. He treats greatness as if it were a disease to be determined only by post-mortem examination.

One of the earliest satires on the character of the Doctrinaire is to be...