A Golden Talisman.—1. The Babu Speech.—2. Bad Language.—3. "Dynamite."—4. The Science of Shells.—5. Idol and Ideal.—6. An Algebraical Expression. WHAT is the meaning of the word Idealist, or Idealistic, as used by Nobel in this Testament? The question is not—What is Idealism? It is—what kind of books did the Testator wish to receive this Prize? It will be seen at once that the second of these questions is very much easier to answer than the first. No one has ever succeeded in defining poetry to any one else's satisfaction—a chemist might define it as the crystal of prose—but universities and academies award prizes every year for poems, and no difficulty is felt as to what works are eligible for the prize. Again, an able writer named Austin once set himself to determine the province of jurisprudence. He died leaving his work unfinished; and the extensive fragment that remains is an endless chain of definitions, not one of them complete. He attempts to define a law, a right, and so on, and the more he toils, the more endless his task becomes. So armed, so guided, the White Knight Errant ought to reach his bourn. I Ideal, Idealism, Idealist—these words are current in most of the languages of America and Europe, but they are not natives of any. They appear in the Somehow I think that the work of the Idealist will have to begin here. II Unhappily the priests of science have shown themselves not less prone than other priesthoods to impose Nevertheless if the use of these bastard Mediterranean words were confined to the naming of things like rocks and plants and animals the quarrel with them might be left to the man of letters. Words like amoeba and neolithic are ugly and tiresome, but they are not false and mischievous. There is even a subtle elegance in naming fossils in a fossil tongue. It is a very different matter when such words are It is just here that the harmfulness of Babu makes itself manifest. It is when we pass from the outer world of things to the inner world of thoughts that we need to be most careful of the words we use; The word before us, then, is not a label, the sort of word that the old Mediterranean grammar-books call a noun. It is what they ignorantly call an adjective; it is the expression of a feeling, like those unshapen cries in which speech began. It is the expression of a wish; perhaps a wish not quite distinct in the Testator's own mind; perhaps a hope rather than a wish. It seems to me that he may have used an indistinct word because his wish was indistinct. He may have hoped that he could say in shorthand what he could not say in longhand, that Babu could say what Swedish could not say. I think, on the other hand, that if he had cast about to find a Swedish word it Idealist is a Babu formation from the Greek Idea. Idea, my Greek lexicon reports, is the appearance of a thing, as opposed to its reality. And it is unfortunately the case that some such sense as that of opposition to reality does haunt the word Idealist, and discredit it. No one is likely to believe that works of an apparent or unreal tendency are of much benefit to mankind. We must dig deeper. Idea can be traced to ido, or eido, (for there were more Greeks than those who corrected Demosthenes)—meaning to look or see. It is the Aryan word which has become in English though. "It is as though" means "it looks like." And so the word idea, in its first sense, may be rendered pretty closely by the English look, in such uses as—"the look of the thing," "there is a look of his father about him." The passage from the idea to the ideal was not made by the Greeks. But it seems that idea is the Ionian form of the word which meets us in other Greek dialects as eidos, and although the Greeks did not add the important letter l to Idea, they did add it to eidos; and their eidolon is spelt by us idol. What is the difference between the ideal and the idol? The idol is the idea embodied in wood or stone. It seems to have grown solid by degrees. There was first the mere look, or likeness, and next the ghost.THE CASTLE IN THE AIR