IV + 

Let me now anticipate the answer which this criticism will probably meet. To some people it will seem that the current movements for reform are inevitably secular; that they have no business to concern themselves with the ultimate faith of men; that they inevitably deal with a limited here and now, a dollar more of wages, a drop less of liquor, a touch more of uniformity, and so forth. In short, our partial utopias need not concern themselves with any of the questions that have to do with the life of the spirit. + 

The simple answer to this crude philosophy is⁠—so much the worse for them. The breach between the institutions that deal with the material life and those that deal with the ideal life results either in a complete dissociation, by which each set of institutions becomes paralytic and imbecile; or, as so often happens, in a capitulation of the spiritual power to the temporal, and its complete engrossment in temporal ends. I am aware that these phrases, “spiritual” and “temporal,” have a certain old-fashioned smell; but they precisely express my meaning: it is plain that every community contains the corresponding institutions⁠—one group being devoted to values and the other to means. When our reforms are not touched by a sense of values, the result is that purely temporal ends are taken as ultimate, and we have such notions as efficiency or organization regarded as the very touchstone of social improvement. This is scarcely an improvement over the old order of things, with which we are now so dismally familiar⁠—the state in which our values were not fertilized by any intercourse with the concrete and actual world about us, and so remained remote and sterile. In short, unless our reformers concern themselves with the ultimate values of men, with what constitutes a good life, they are bound to pander to such immediate faiths and superstitions as the National State, Efficiency, or the White Man’s Burden. + 