stitution of things is discoverable
in a sufficient measure to guide our action to a successful issue.
Belief in Karma, in prayer, in sacraments, in salvation is a remnant of
a natural belief in the possibility of living successfully. The remnant
may be small and "expressed in fancy." Transmigration or an atonement
may be chimerical ideas. Yet the mere fact of reliance upon something,
the assumption that the world is steady and capable of rational
exploitation, even if in a supernatural interest and by semi-magical
means, amounts to an essential loyalty to postulates of practical
reason, an essential adherence to natural morality.

The pretension to have reached a point of view from which _all_ impulse
may be criticised is accordingly an untenable pretension. It is
abandoned in the very systems in which it was to be most thoroughly
applied. The instrument of criticism must itself be one impulse
surviving the wreck of all the others; the vision of salvation and of
the way thither must be one dream among the rest. A single suggestion of
experience is thus accepted while all others are denied; and although a
certain purification and revision of morality may hence ensue, there is
no real penetration to a deeper principle than spontaneous reason, no
revelation of a higher end than the best possible happiness. One
sporadic growth of human nature may be substituted for its whole
luxuriant vegetation; one negative or formal element of happiness may
be preferred to the full entelechy of life. We may see the Life of
Reason reduced to straits, made to express itself in a niggardly and
fantastic environment; but we have, in principle and essence, the Life
of Reason still, empirical in its basis and rational in its method, its
substance impulse and its end happiness.

[Sidenote: Spontaneous values rehabilitated.]

So much for the umbilical cord that unites every living post-rational
system to the matrix of human hopes. There remains a second point of
contact between these systems and rational morality: the reinstated
natural duties which all religions and philosophies, in order to subsist
among civilised peoples, are at once obliged to sanction and somehow to
deduce from their peculiar principles. The most plausible evidence which
a supernatural doctrine can give of its truth is the beauty and
rationality of its moral corollaries. It is instructive to observe that
a gospel's congruity with natural reason and common humanity is reg