Some men -- not all men -- see always before them an ideal, a mental picture if you will, of what they ought to be, and are not. Whoso seeks to follow this ideal revealed to the mental vision, whoso seeks to attain to conformity with it, will find it enlarge itself, and remove from him. He that follows it will improve his own moral character, but the ideal will remain always above him and before him, prompting him to new exertions.
William Batchelder Greene (1872). “The blazing star; with an appendix treating of the Jewish Kabbala, also a tract on the philosophy of H. Spencer, and one on New-England transcendentalism”, p.3
