ether these various aspects of human
excellence, to see them as parts of one ideal and labour to approach it.
This approach is progress, and if you say 'progress of what, and to what
end', the answer can only be, the progress of humanity, and the end
further progress. Some of the writers in this book will indicate the
point at which in their view this progress is in contact with the
infinite, with something not given in history; but, whatever our view of
the transcendental problem may be, it is of the utmost importance for
all of us to realize that we have given to us in the actual process of
time, in concrete history, a development of humanity, a growth from a
lower to a higher state of being, which may be most perfectly realized
in the individual consciousness, fully awake and fully socialized, but
is also clearly traceable in the doings of the human race as a whole.
Such is in fact the uniting thread of these essays, and when we proceed
to the converse of this truth and apply this ideal which we have shown
to be the course of realization, as a governing motive in our lives, it
is even more imperative to strive constantly to keep the whole
together, and not to regard either knowledge or power or beauty or even
love as an ultimate and supreme thing to which all other ends are merely
means. The end is a more perfect man, developed by the perfecting of all
mankind.

Such a conception embraces all the separate aspects of our nature each
in its place, and each from its own angle supreme. Love and knowledge
inseparable and fundamental, freedom and happiness essential conditions
of healthy growth, personality developed with the development of the
greater personality in which we all live and grow. This greater
personality is at its highest immeasurably above us, and has no
assignable limits in time or in capacity to know, to love, or to enjoy.
We cannot fix its origin at any known point in the birth of planets, nor
does the cooling of our sun nor of all the suns seem to put any limit in
our imagination to the continuous unfolding of life like our own. While
thus practically infinite, the ideal of human nature is revealed to us
concretely in countless types of goodness and truth and beauty which we
may know and love and imitate. To all it is open to study the lineaments
of this ideal in the records and figures of the past; to most it is
revealed in some fellow beings known in life. From these, the human
spirits which embody th