appreciation for natural pleasures, it
would constitute a reversal of the Life of Reason which, if persistently
indulged in, could only issue in madness or revert to imbecility.

[Sidenote: Need of unity and finality.]

[Sidenote: Ideals of nothing.]

No less important, however, than this basis which the ideal must have in
extant demands, is the harmony with which reason must endow it. If
without the one the ideal loses its value, without the other it loses
its finality. Human nature is fluid and imperfect; its demands are
expressed in incidental desires, elicited by a variety of objects which
perhaps cannot coexist in the world. If we merely transcribe these
miscellaneous demands or allow these floating desires to dictate to us
the elements of the ideal, we shall never come to a Whole or to an End.
One new fancy after another will seem an embodiment of perfection, and
we shall contradict each expression of our ideal by every other. A
certain school of philosophy--if we may give that name to the systematic
neglect of reason--has so immersed itself in the contemplation of this
sort of inconstancy, which is indeed prevalent enough in the world, that
it has mistaken it for a normal and necessary process. The greatness of
the ideal has been put in its vagueness and in an elasticity which makes
it wholly indeterminate and inconsistent. The goal of progress, beside
being thus made to lie at every point of the compass in succession, is
removed to an infinite distance, whereby the possibility of attaining it
is denied and progress itself is made illusory. For a progress must be
directed to attaining some definite type of life, the counterpart of a
given natural endowment, and nothing can be called an improvement which
does not contain an appreciable benefit. A victory would be a mockery
that left us, for some new reason, as much impeded as before and as far
removed from peace.

The picture of life as an eternal war for illusory ends was drawn at
first by satirists, unhappily with too much justification in the facts.
Some grosser minds, too undisciplined to have ever pursued a good either
truly attainable or truly satisfactory, then proceeded to mistake that
satire on human folly for a sober account of the whole universe; and
finally others were not ashamed to represent it as the ideal itself--so
soon is the dyer's hand subdued to what it works in. A barbarous mind
cannot conceive life, like health, as a harmony continually