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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: of the golden mean. Political reformers accomplish their
successive tasks in the history of nations by being blind for the
time to other causes. Great schools of art work out the effects
which it is their mission to reveal, at the cost of a
one-sidedness for which other schools must make amends. We
accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo,
with a kind of indulgence. We are glad they existed to show us
that way, but we are glad there are also other ways of seeing and
taking life. So of many of the saints whom we have looked at.
We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately
extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the
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