d holiness
his moral life would have evaporated.

These melodramatic prophecies, however, need not alarm us. They are
founded on nothing but rhetoric and small allegiance to any genuine
good. When we attain perfection of function we lose consciousness of the
medium, to become more clearly conscious of the result. The eye that
does its duty gives no report of itself and has no sense of muscular
tension or weariness; but it gives all the brighter and steadier image
of the object seen. Consciousness is not lost when focussed, and the
labour of vision is abolished in its fruition. So the musician, could he
play so divinely as to be unconscious of his body, his instrument, and
the very lapse of time, would be only the more absorbed in the harmony,
more completely master of its unities and beauty. At such moments the
body's long labour at last brings forth the soul. Life from its
inception is simply some partial natural harmony raising its voice and
bearing witness to its own existence; to perfect that harmony is to
round out and intensify that life. This is the very secret of power, of
joy, of intelligence. Not to have understood it is to have passed
through life without understanding anything.

The analogy extends to morals, where also the means may be
advantageously forgotten when the end has been secured. That leisure to
which work is directed and that perfection in which virtue would be
fulfilled are so far from being apathetic that they are states of pure
activity, by containing which other acts are rescued from utter
passivity and unconsciousness. Impure feeling ranges between two
extremes: absolute want and complete satisfaction. The former limit is
reached in anguish, madness, or the agony of death, when the accidental
flux of things in contradiction has reached its maximum or vanishing
point, so that the contradiction and the flux themselves disappear by
diremption. Such feeling denotes inward disorganisation and a hopeless
conflict of reflex actions tending toward dissolution. The second limit
is reached in contemplation, when anything is loved, understood, or
enjoyed. Synthetic power is then at its height; the mind can survey its
experience and correlate all the motions it suggests. Power in the mind
is exactly proportionate to representative scope, and representative
scope to rational activity. A steady vision of all things in their true
order and worth results from perfection of function and is its index; it
s