d only to a
kindred mind. Hostile natures cannot be brought together by mutual
invective nor harmonised by the brute destruction and disappearance of
either party. But when one or both parties have actually disappeared,
and the combat has ceased for lack of combatants, natures not hostile to
one another can fill the vacant place. In proportion to their inbred
unanimity these will cultivate a similar ideal and rejoice together in
its embodiment.

[Sidenote: Natural selection of minds.]

This has happened to some extent in the whole world, on account of
natural conditions which limit the forms of life possible in one region;
for nature is intolerant in her laxity and punishes too great
originality and heresy with death. Such moral integration has occurred
very markedly in every good race and society whose members, by adapting
themselves to the same external forces, have created and discovered
their common soul. Spiritual unity is a natural product. There are those
who see a great mystery in the presence of eternal values and impersonal
ideals in a moving and animal world, and think to solve that dualism, as
they call it, by denying that nature can have spiritual functions or
spirit a natural cause; but nothing can be simpler if we make, as we
should, existence the test of possibility. _Ab esse ad posse valet
illatio_. Nature is a perfect garden of ideals, and passion is the
perpetual and fertile soil for poetry, myth, and speculation. Nor is
this origin merely imputed to ideals by a late and cynical observer: it
is manifest in the ideals themselves, by their subject matter and
intent. For what are ideals about, what do they idealise, except natural
existence and natural passions? That would be a miserable and
superfluous ideal indeed that was nobody's ideal of nothing. The
pertinence of ideals binds them to nature, and it is only the worst and
flimsiest ideals, the ideals of a sick soul, that elude nature's limits
and belie her potentialities. Ideals are forerunners or heralds of
nature's successes, not always followed, indeed, by their fulfilment,
for nature is but nature and has to feel her way; but they are an
earnest, at least, of an achieved organisation, an incipient
accomplishment, that tends to maintain and root itself in the world.

To speak of nature's successes is, of course, to impute success
retroactively; but the expression may be allowed when we consider that
the same functional equilibrium which is look