life. For we have
faculties, and habits, and impulses. These are the basis of our
demands. And these demands, although variable, constitute an
ever-present intrinsic standard of value by which we feel and judge.
The ideal is immanent in them; for the ideal means that
environment in which our faculties would find their freest
employment, and their most congenial world. Perfection would be
nothing but life under those conditions. Accordingly our
consciousness of the ideal becomes distinct in proportion as we
advance in virtue and in proportion to the vigour and definiteness
with which our faculties work. When the vital harmony is
complete, when the _act_ is _pure,_ faith in perfection passes into
vision. That man is unhappy indeed, who in all his life has had no
glimpse of perfection, who in the ecstasy of love, or in the delight
of contemplation, has never been able to say: It is attained. Such
moments of inspiration are the source of the arts, which have no
higher function than to renew them.

A work of art is indeed a monument to such a moment, the
memorial to such a vision; and its charm varies with its power of
recalling us from the distractions of common life to the joy of a
more natural and perfect activity.

_The stability of the ideal._

Sec. 66. The perfection thus revealed is relative to our nature and
faculties; if it were not, it could have no value for us. It is revealed
to us in brief moments, but it is not for that reason an unstable or
fantastic thing. Human attention inevitably flickers; we survey
things in succession, and our acts of synthesis and our realization
of fact are only occasional. This is the tenure of all our possessions;
we are not uninterruptedly conscious of ourselves, our physical
environment, our ruling passions, or our deepest conviction. What
wonder, then, that we are not constantly conscious of that
perfection which is the implicit ideal of all our preferences and
desires? We view it only in parts, as passion or perception
successively directs our attention to its various elements. Some of
us never try to conceive it in its totality. Yet our whole life is an act
of worship to this unknown divinity; every heartfelt prayer is
offered before one or another of its images.

This ideal of perfection varies, indeed, but only with the variations
of our nature of which it is the counterpart and entelechy. There is
perhaps no more frivolous notion than that to which Schopenhauer
has giv