instincts, reacting on inevitable accidents. There is tragedy
in perfection, because the universe in which perfection arises is
itself imperfect. Accidents will always continue to harass the most
consummate organism; they will flow in both from the outer world and
from the interstices, so to speak, of its own machinery; for a rational
life touches the irrational at its core as well as at its periphery. In
both directions it meets physical force and can subsist only by
exercising physical force in return. The range of rational ethics is
limited to the intermediate political zone, in which existences have
attained some degree of natural unanimity.

It should be added, perhaps, that the frontiers between moral and
physical action are purely notional. Real existences do not lie wholly
on one or the other side of them. Every man, every material object, has
moral affinities enveloping an indomitable vital nucleus or brute
personal kernel; this moral essence is enveloped in turn by untraceable
relations, radiating to infinity over the natural world. The stars enter
society by the light and knowledge they afford, the time they keep, and
the ornament they lavish; but they are mere dead weights in their
substance and cosmological puzzles in their destiny. You and I possess
manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his
poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams. Beyond the little
span of his foresight and love, each is merely a physical agency,
preparing the way quite irresponsibly for undreamt-of revolutions and
alien lives.

[Sidenote: A rational morality not attainable,]

A truly rational morality, or social regimen, has never existed in the
world and is hardly to be looked for. What guides men and nations in
their practice is always some partial interest or some partial
disillusion. A rational morality would imply perfect self-knowledge, so
that no congenial good should be needlessly missed--least of all
practical reason or justice itself; so that no good congenial to other
creatures would be needlessly taken from them. The total value which
everything had from the agent's point of view would need to be
determined and felt efficaciously; and, among other things, the total
value which this point of view, with the conduct it justified, would
have for every foreign interest which it affected. Such knowledge, such
definition of purpose, and such perfection of sympathy are clearly
beyond man's