ation as much as essences do, and
without an articulate and fixed purpose, without an ideal, action would
collapse into mere motion or conscious change. It is notably in this
region that elucidation constitutes progress; for to understand the
properties of number may be less important than empirically to count;
but to see and feel the values of things in all their distinction and
fulness is the ultimate fruit of efficiency; it is mastery in that art
of life for which all the rest is apprenticeship. Dialectic of this sort
is practised intuitively by spiritual minds; and even when it has to be
carried on argumentatively it may prove very enlightening. That the
excellence of courage is identical with that of wisdom still needs to be
driven home; and that the excellence of poetry is identical with that of
all other things probably sounds like a blind paradox. Yet did not all
excellences conspire to one end and meet in one Life of Reason, how
could their relative value be estimated, or any reflective sanction be
found for them at all? The miscellaneous, captious fancies of the will,
the menagerie of moral prejudices, still call for many a Socrates to
tame them. So long as courage means a grimace of mind or body, the love
of it is another grimace. But if it meant the value, recognisable by
reason and diffused through all life, which that casual attitude or
feeling might have, then we should be launched upon the quest for
wisdom.

The want of integration in moral views is like what want of integration
would be in arithmetic if we declared that it was the part of a man and
a Christian to maintain that _my_ two equals four or that a _green_
fifteen is a hundred. These propositions might have incidental lights
and shades in people's lives to make them plausible and precious; but
they could not be maintained by one who had clarified his intent in
naming and adding. For then the arithmetical relations would be
abstracted, and their incidental associates would drop out of the
account. So a man who is in pursuit of things for the good that is in
them must recognise and (if reason avails) must pursue what is good in
them all. Strange customs and unheard-of thoughts may then find their
appropriate warrant; just as in higher mathematical calculations very
wonderful and unforeseen results may be arrived at, which a man will not
accept without careful reconsideration of the terms and problem before
him; but if he finds the unexpected conc