ust in the end
involve the primary human faculties and cannot be essentially
incompatible with any other ideal which involves them too.

To adjust all demands to one ideal and adjust that ideal to its natural
conditions--in other words, to live the Life of Reason--is something
perfectly possible; for those demands, being akin to one another in
spite of themselves, can be better furthered by co-operation than by
blind conflict, while the ideal, far from demanding any profound
revolution in nature, merely expresses her actual tendency and forecasts
what her perfect functioning would be.

[Sidenote: Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason.]

Reason as such represents or rather constitutes a single formal
interest, the interest in harmony. When two interests are simultaneous
and fall within one act of apprehension the desirability of harmonising
them is involved in the very effort to realise them together. If
attention and imagination are steady enough to face this implication
and not to allow impulse to oscillate between irreconcilable tendencies,
reason comes into being. Henceforth things actual and things desired are
confronted by an ideal which has both pertinence and authority.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote E: Descent of Man, chapter iii.]

CHAPTER XII--FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE

[Sidenote: Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed.]

A conception of something called human nature arises not unnaturally on
observing the passions of men, passions which under various disguises
seem to reappear in all ages and countries. The tendency of Greek
philosophy, with its insistence on general concepts, was to define this
idea of human nature still further and to encourage the belief that a
single and identical essence, present in all men, determined their
powers and ideal destiny. Christianity, while it transposed the human
ideal and dwelt on the superhuman affinities of man, did not abandon the
notion of a specific humanity. On the contrary, such a notion was
implied in the Fall and Redemption, in the Sacraments, and in the
universal validity of Christian doctrine and precept. For if human
nature were not one, there would be no propriety in requiring all men to
preserve unanimity in faith or conformity in conduct. Human nature was
likewise the entity which the English psychologists set themselves to
describe; and Kant was so entirely dominated by the notion of a fixed
and universal human nature