the
eternal. What would you have? What is the goal of your endeavour? It
must be some success, the establishment of some order, the expression of
some experience. These points once reached, we are not left merely with
the satisfaction of abstract success or the consciousness of ideal
immortality. Being natural goals, these ideals are related to natural
functions. Their attainment does not exhaust but merely liberates, in
this instance, the function concerned, and so marks the perpetual point
of reference common to that function in all its fluctuations. Every
attainment of perfection in an art--as for instance in government--makes
a return to perfection easier for posterity, since there remains an
enlightening example, together with faculties predisposed by discipline
to recover their ancient virtue. The better a man evokes and realises
the ideal the more he leads the life that all others, in proportion to
their worth, will seek to live after him, and the more he helps them to
live in that nobler fashion. His presence in the society of immortals
thus becomes, so to speak, more pervasive. He not only vanquishes time,
by his own rationality, living now in the eternal, but he continually
lives again in all rational beings.

Since the ideal has this perpetual pertinence to mortal struggles, he
who lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society or in art
enjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while he
lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the same
absorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best in
him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could
rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any
subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die;
for he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his
being. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of
universal mutation, he will have identified himself with what is
spiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so
conceiving himself, he may truly feel and know that he is eternal.

CHAPTER XV

CONCLUSION

[Sidenote: The failure of magic.]

The preceding analysis of religion, although it is illustrated mainly by
Christianity, may enable us in a general way to distinguish the rational
goal of all religious life. In no sphere is the contrast clearer between
wisdom and folly; in none, perhaps, ha