authority and with a merely potential or
represented existence. For to be actual and self-existent is to be
individual. The living mind cannot surrender its rights to any physical
power or subordinate itself to any figment of its own art without
falling into manifest idolatry.

[Sidenote: Reason autonomous.].

Human nature, in the sense in which it is the transcendental foundation
of all science and morals, is a functional unity in each man; it is no
general or abstract essence, the average of all men's characters, nor
even the complex of the qualities common to all men. It is the entelechy
of the living individual, be he typical or singular. That his type
should be odd or common is merely a physical accident. If he can know
himself by expressing the entelechy of his own nature in the form of a
consistent ideal, he is a rational creature after his own kind, even if,
like the angels of Saint Thomas, he be the only individual of his
species. What the majority of human animals may tend to, or what the
past or future variations of a race may be, has nothing to do with
determining the ideal of human nature in a living man, or in an ideal
society of men bound together by spiritual kinship. Otherwise Plato
could not have reasoned well about the republic without adjusting
himself to the politics of Buddha or Rousseau, and we should not be able
to determine our own morality without making concessions to the
cannibals or giving a vote to the ants. Within the field of an
anthropology that tests humanity by the skull's shape, there might be
room for any number of independent moralities, and although, as we shall
see, there is actually a similar foundation in all human and even in all
animal natures, which supports a rudimentary morality common to all, yet
a perfect morality is not really common to any two men nor to any two
phases of the same man's life.

[Sidenote: Its distribution.]

The distribution of reason, though a subject irrelevant to pure logic or
morals, is one naturally interesting to a rational man, for he is
concerned to know how far beings exist with a congenial structure and an
ideal akin to his own. That circumstance will largely influence his
happiness if, being a man, he is a gregarious and sympathetic animal.
His moral idealism itself will crave support from others, if not to give
it direction, at least to give it warmth and courage. The best part of
wealth is to have worthy heirs, and mind can be transmitte