sequence is that his nature has a moving centre, his
functions an external reference, and his ideal a true ideality. What he
strives to preserve, in preserving himself, is something which he never
has been at any particular moment. He maintains his equilibrium by
motion. His goal is in a sense beyond him, since it is not his
experience, but a form which all experience ought to receive. The inmost
texture of his being is propulsive, and there is nothing more intimately
bound up with his success than mobility and devotion to transcendent
aims. If there is a transitive function in knowledge and an unselfish
purpose in love, that is only because, at bottom, there is a
self-reproductive, flying essence in all existence.

If the equilibrium of man's being were stable he would need neither
nutrition, reproduction, nor sense. As it is, sense must renew his ideas
and guide his instincts otherwise than as their inner evolution would
demand; and regenerative processes must strive to repair beneath the
constant irreparable lapse of his substance. His business is to create
and remodel those organisms in which ideals are bred. In order to have a
soul to save he must perpetually form it anew; he must, so to speak,
_earn his own living_. In this vital labour, we may ask, is nutrition or
reproduction the deeper function? Or, to put the corresponding moral
question, is the body or the state the primary good?

[Sidenote: Nutrition and reproduction]

If we view the situation from the individual's side, as
self-consciousness might view it, we may reply that nutrition is
fundamental, for if the body were not nourished every faculty would
decay. Could nutrition only succeed and keep the body young,
reproduction would be unnecessary, with its poor pretence at maintaining
the mobile human form in a series of examples. On the other hand, if we
view the matter from above, as science and philosophy should, we may say
that nutrition is but germination of a pervasive sort, that the body is
a tabernacle in which the transmissible human spirit is carried for a
while, a shell for the immortal seed that dwells in it and has created
it. This seed, however, for rational estimation, is merely a means to
the existence and happiness of individuals. Transpersonal and continuous
in its own fluid being, the potential grows personal in its ideal
fulfilments. In other words, this potentiality is material (though
called sometimes an idea) and has its only value