eans the ideality of something
embodied and material. Activity, achievement, a passage from prospect
to realisation, is evidently essential to life. If all ends were already
reached, and no art were requisite, life could not exist at all, much
less a Life of Reason. No politics, no morals, no thought would be
possible, for all these move towards some ideal and envisage a goal to
which they presently pass. The transition is the activity, without which
achievement would lose its zest and indeed its meaning; for a situation
could never be achieved which had been given from all eternity. The
ideal is a concomitant emanation from the natural and has no other
possible status. Those human possessions which are perennial and of
inalienable value are in a manner potential possessions only. Knowledge,
art, love are always largely in abeyance, while power is absolutely
synonymous with potentiality. Fruition requires a continual recovery, a
repeated re-establishment of the state we enjoy. So breath and
nutrition, feeling and thought, come in pulsations; they have only a
periodic and rhythmic sort of actuality. The operation may be sustained
indefinitely, but only if it admits a certain internal oscillation.

A creature like man, whose mode of being is a life or experience and not
a congealed ideality, such as eternal truth might show, must accordingly
find something to do; he must operate in an environment in which
everything is not already what he is presently to make it. In the actual
world this first condition of life is only too amply fulfilled; the real
difficulty in man's estate, the true danger to his vitality, lies not
in want of work but in so colossal a disproportion between demand and
opportunity that the ideal is stunned out of existence and perishes for
want of hope. The Life of Reason is continually beaten back upon its
animal sources, and nations are submerged in deluge after deluge of
barbarism. Impressed as we may well be by this ancient experience, we
should not overlook the complementary truth which under more favourable
circumstances would be as plain as the other: namely, that our deepest
interest is after all to live, and we could not live if all acquisition,
assimilation, government, and creation had been made impossible for us
by their foregone realisation, so that every operation was forestalled
by the given fact. The distinction between the ideal and the real is one
which the human ideal itself insists shou