t to them is sought they begin to be understood, for it is only
by studying their expression and tendency that the degree of their
hostility can be measured. But to understand is more than to forgive, it
is to adopt; and the passion that thought merely to withdraw into a
sullen and maimed self-indulgence can feel itself expanded by sympathies
which in its primal vehemence it would have excluded altogether.
Experience, in bringing humility, brings intelligence also. Personal
interests begin to seem relative, factors only in a general voluminous
welfare expressed in many common institutions and arts, moulds for
whatever is communicable or rational in every passion. Each original
impulse, when trimmed down more or less according to its degree of
savageness, can then inhabit the state, and every good, when
sufficiently transfigured, can be found again in the general ideal. The
factors may indeed often be unrecognisable in the result, so much does
the process of domestication transform them; but the interests that
animated them survive this discipline and the new purpose is really
esteemed; else the ideal would have no moral force. An ideal
representing no living interest would be irrelevant to practice, just as
a conception of reality would be irrelevant to perception which should
not be composed of the materials that sense supplies, or should not
re-embody actual sensations in an intelligible system.

[Sidenote: The ideal natural.]

Here we have, then, one condition which the ideal must fulfil: it must
be a resultant or synthesis of impulses already afoot. An ideal out of
relation to the actual demands of living beings is so far from being an
ideal that it is not even a good. The pursuit of it would be not the
acme but the atrophy of moral endeavour. Mysticism and asceticism run
into this danger, when the intent to be faithful to a supreme good too
symbolically presented breeds a superstitious repugnance toward
everything naturally prized. So also an artificial scepticism can regard
all experience as deceptive, by contrasting it with the chimera of an
absolute reality. As an absolute reality would be indescribable and
without a function in the elucidation of phenomena, so a supreme good
which was good for nobody would be without conceivable value. Respect
for such an idol is a dialectical superstition; and if zeal for that
shibboleth should actually begin to inhibit the exercise of intelligent
choice or the development of