gevity, resurrection, or
metempsychosis, a hybrid principle is required: thus, even if we have
answered those moral questions in the conventional way and satisfied
ourselves that personal immortality is a postulate of ethics, we cannot
infer that immortality therefore exists unless we import into the
argument a tremendous optimistic postulate, to the effect that what is
requisite for moral rationality must in every instance be realised in
experience.

Such an optimistic postulate, however, as the reader must have
repeatedly observed, is made not only despite all experience but in
ignorance of the conditions under which alone ideals are framed and
retain their significance. Every ideal expresses individual and specific
tendencies, proper at some moment to some natural creature; every ideal
therefore has for its basis a part only of the dynamic world, so that
its fulfilment is problematical and altogether adventitious to its
existence and authority. To decide whether an ideal can be or will be
fulfilled we must examine the physical relation between such organic
forces as that ideal expresses and the environment in which those forces
operate; we may then perceive how far a realisation of the given aims is
possible, how far it must fail, and how far the aims in question, by a
shift in their natural basis, will lapse and yield to others, possibly
more capable of execution and more stable in the world. The question of
success is a question of physics. To say that an ideal will be
inevitably fulfilled simply because it is an ideal is to say something
gratuitous and foolish. Pretence cannot in the end avail against
experience.

[Sidenote: Transition to ideality.]

Nevertheless, it is important to define ideals even before their
realisation is known to be possible, because they constitute one of the
two factors whose interaction and adjustment is moral life, factors
which are complementary and diverse in function and may be independently
ascertained. The value of existences is wholly borrowed from their
ideality, without direct consideration of their fate, while the
existence of ideals is wholly determined by natural forces, without
direct relation to their fulfilment. Existence and ideal value can
therefore be initially felt and observed apart, although of course a
complete description would lay bare physical necessity in the ideals
entertained and inevitable ideal harmonies among the facts discovered.
Human life, lying as