erms of peace. This suggested peace, inspired by sympathy and by
knowledge of the world, is the ideal, which borrows its value and
practical force from the irrational impulses which it embodies, and
borrows its final authority from the truth with which it recognises them
all and the necessity by which it imposes on each such sacrifices as are
requisite to a general harmony.

[Sidenote: Reason imposes no new sacrifice.]

Could each impulse, apart from reason, gain perfect satisfaction,
it would doubtless laugh at justice. The divine, to exercise
suasion, must use an _argumentum ad hominem_; reason must justify
itself to the heart. But perfect satisfaction is what an
irresponsible impulse can never hope for: all other impulses,
though absent perhaps from the mind, are none the less present in
nature and have possession of the field through their physical
basis. They offer effectual resistance to a reckless intruder. To
disregard them is therefore to gain nothing: reason, far from
creating the partial renunciation and proportionate sacrifices
which it imposes, really minimises them by making them voluntary
and fruitful. The ideal, which may seem to wear so severe a frown,
really fosters all possible pleasures; what it retrenches is
nothing to what blind forces and natural catastrophes would
otherwise cut off; while it sweetens what it sanctions, adding to
spontaneous enjoyments a sense of moral security and an
intellectual light.

[Sidenote: Natural goods attainable and compatible in principle.]

Those who are guided only by an irrational conscience can hardly
understand what a good life would be. Their Utopias have to be
supernatural in order that the irresponsible rules which they call
morality may lead by miracle to happy results. But such a magical and
undeserved happiness, if it were possible, would be unsavoury: only one
phase of human nature would be satisfied by it, and so impoverished an
ideal cannot really attract the will. For human nature has been moulded
by the same natural forces among which its ideal has to be fulfilled,
and, apart from a certain margin of wild hopes and extravagances, the
things man's heart desires are attainable under his natural conditions
and would not be attainable elsewhere. The conflict of desires and
interests in the world is not radical any more than man's
dissatisfaction with his own nature can be; for every particular ideal,
being an expression of human nature in operation, m