remained
in crude experience, if no cumulative reflection, no art, and no science
had come to dominate and foreshorten that equable flow of substance,
arresting it ideally in behalf of some rational interest.

Thus it comes to pass that rational interests have a certain ascendancy
in the world, as well as an absolute authority over it; for they arise
where an organic equilibrium has naturally established itself. Such an
equilibrium maintains itself by virtue of the same necessity that
produced it; without arresting the flux or introducing any miracle, it
sustains in being an ideal form. This form is what consciousness
corresponds to and raises to actual existence; so that significant
thoughts are something which nature necessarily lingers upon and seems
to serve. The being to whom they come is the most widely based and
synthetic of her creatures. The mind spreads and soars in proportion as
the body feeds on the surrounding world. Noble ideas, although rare and
difficult to attain, are not naturally fugitive.

[Sidenote: All experience at bottom liberal.]

Consciousness is not ideal merely in its highest phases; it is ideal
through and through. On one level as much as on another, it celebrates
an attained balance in nature, or grieves at its collapse; it prophesies
and remembers, it loves and dreams. It sees even nature from the point
of view of ideal interests, and measures the flux of things by ideal
standards. It registers its own movement, like that of its objects,
entirely in ideal terms, looking to fixed goals of its own imagining,
and using nothing in the operation but concretions in discourse. Primary
mathematical notions, for instance, are evidences of a successful
reactive method attained in the organism and translated in consciousness
into a stable grammar which has wide applicability and great
persistence, so that it has come to be elaborated ideally into
prodigious abstract systems of thought. Every experience of victory,
eloquence, or beauty is a momentary success of the same kind, and if
repeated and sustained becomes a spiritual possession.

[Sidenote: Social experience has its ideality too.]

Society also breeds its ideal harmonies. At first it establishes
affections between beings naturally conjoined in the world; later it
grows sensitive to free and spiritual affinities, to oneness of mind and
sympathetic purposes. These ideal affinities, although grounded like the
others on material relations (fo