n consists
in the conception or the intuition of ideals and in the pursuit of
them. And ideals, I have said, are of two kinds. Let us make the
distinction clearer. Every sort of human activity--shoeing horses,
abdominal surgery, or painting profiles--admits of a peculiar type
of excellence. No sort of activity can escape from its own type
but within its type it admits of indefinite improvement. For each
type there is an ideal--a dream of perfection--an unattainable limit
of an endless sequence of potential ameliorations within the type
and on its level. The dreams of such unattainable perfections are
as countless as the types of excellence to which they respectively
belong and they together constitute the familiar world of our
human ideals. To share in it--to feel the lure of perfection in one
or more types of excellence, however lowly--is to be human; not to
feel it is to be sub-human. But this common kind of idealization,
though it is very important and very precious, does not produce
the great events in the life of mankind. These are produced by the
kind of idealization that corresponds to what we have called in
the mathematical prototype, limit-begotten generalization--a kind
of idealization that is peculiar to creative genius and that, not
content to pursue ideals within established types of excellences,
creates new types thereof in science, in art, in philosophy, in
letters, in ethics, in education, in social order, in all the
fields and forms of the spiritual life of man." (Quoted from the
manuscript of the forthcoming book, _Mathematical Philosophy_, by
Cassius J. Keyser.)

"Survival of the fittest" has a different form for different classes of
life. Applying animal standards to time-binding beings is like applying
inches to measuring weight. As a matter or fact, we cannot raise one class
to a higher class, unless we add an entirely new function to the former;
we can only improve their lower status; but if we apply the reverse
method, we can degrade human standards to animal standards.

Animal standards belong to a class of life whose capacity is _not_ an
_exponential_ function of _Time_. There is nothing theological or
sentimental in this fact; it is a purely mathematical truth.

It is fatal to apply the "survival of the fittest" theory in the same
sense to two radically different classes of life. The "surviv