possessed for ages in a wild state before the advent of
civilisation. They merely revert to their uncivil condition and espouse
whatever imaginative ideal comes to hand, by which some semblance of
meaning and beauty may be given to existence without the labour of
building this meaning and beauty systematically out of its positive
elements.

Not to study these imaginative ideals, partial and arbitrary as they
are, would be to miss one of the most instructive points of view from
which the Life of Reason may be surveyed: the point of view of its
satirists. For moral ideals may follow upon philosophy, just as they may
precede it. When they follow, at least so long as they are consciously
embraced in view of reason's failure, they have a quite particular
value. Aversion to rational ideals does not then come, as the
intuitionist's aversion does, from moral incoherence or religious
prejudice. It does not come from lack of speculative power. On the
contrary, it may come from undue haste in speculation, from a too ready
apprehension of the visible march of things. The obvious irrationality
of nature as a whole, too painfully brought home to a musing mind, may
make it forget or abdicate its own rationality. In a decadent age, the
philosopher who surveys the world and sees that the end of it is even as
the beginning, may not feel that the intervening episode, in which he
and all he values after all figure, is worth consideration; and he may
cry, in his contemplative spleen, that _all_ is vanity.

If you should still confront him with a theory of the ideal, he would
not be reduced, like the pre-rational moralists in a similar case, to
mere inattention and bluster. If you told him that every art and every
activity involves a congruous good, and that the endeavour to realise
the ideal in every direction is an effort of which reason necessarily
approves, since reason is nothing but the method of that endeavour, he
would not need to deny your statements in order to justify himself. He
might admit the naturalness, the spontaneity, the ideal sufficiency of
your conceptions; but he might add, with the smile of the elder and the
sadder man, that he had experience of their futility. "You Hellenisers,"
he might say, "are but children; you have not pondered the little
history you know. If thought were conversant with reality, if virtue
were stable and fruitful, if pains and policy were ultimately justified
by a greater good arising out of th