A world which stopped short of realisation in action would not only lose the fathomless dramatic interest which inheres in human life, but it would part with all those moral implications of the integrity and persistence of the individual soul, its moral quality and its moral responsibility, which make man something different from the dust which whirls about him on the highway, or the stone over which he stumbles.

This is precisely the character of those speculative systems which deny the reality of action and substitute the idea for the deed; such a world does more than suffocate the individual soul; it destroys the very meaning of life by robbing it of moral order and meaning.

The end of such a conception of the universe is necessarily annihilation, and its mood is necessarily despair.
"How can a man come to know himself ?" asked Goethe.

"Never by thinking, but by doing." Now, this knowledge of self in the large sense is precisely the knowledge which ripens and clarifies us, which gives us sanity, repose, and power.

To know what is in humanity and what life means to humanity, we must study humanity in its active, not in its passive, moods; in the hours when it is doing, not thinking.
Sooner or later all its thinking which has any reality in it passes on into action.