s only goal would be to escape humanity and lose himself in the
divine nebula that has produced and must invalidate each of his thoughts
and ideals. As there would be but one spirit in the world, and that
infinite, so there would be but one ideal and that indiscriminate. The
despair which the naturalist's view of human instability might tend to
produce is turned by this mystical initiation into a sort of ecstasy;
and the deluge of conformity suddenly submerges that Life of Reason
which science seemed to condemn to gradual extinction.

[Sidenote: Instability in existences does not dethrone their ideals.]

Reason is a human function. Though the name of reason has been applied
to various alleged principles of cosmic life, vital or dialectical,
these principles all lack the essence of rationality, in that they are
not conscious movements toward satisfaction, not, in other words, moral
and beneficent principles at all. Be the instability of human nature
what it may, therefore, the instability of reason is not less, since
reason is but a function of human nature. However relative and
subordinate, in a physical sense, human ideals may be, these ideals
remain the only possible moral standards for man, the only tests which
he can apply for value or authority, in any other quarter. And among
unstable and relative ideals none is more relative and unstable than
that which transports all value to a universal law, itself indifferent
to good and evil, and worships it as a deity. Such an idolatry would
indeed be impossible if it were not partial and veiled, arrived at in
following out some human interest and clung to by force of moral inertia
and the ambiguity of words. In truth mystics do not practise so entire a
renunciation of reason as they preach: eternal validity and the capacity
to deal with absolute reality are still assumed by them to belong to
thought or at least to feeling. Only they overlook in their description
of human nature just that faculty which they exercise in their
speculation; their map leaves out the ground on which they stand. The
rest, which they are not identified with for the moment, they proceed
to regard _de haut en bas_ and to discredit as a momentary manifestation
of universal laws, physical or divine. They forget that this faith in
law, this absorption in the blank reality, this enthusiasm for the
ultimate thought, are mere human passions like the rest; that they
endure them as they might a fever and tha