dignities would
need to be determined by some supervening ideal. A nature existing in
act would require metaphysics--the account of a deeper nature--to
express its relation to the mind that knew and judged it. Any actual god
would need to possess a religion of his own, in order to fix his ideal
of conduct and his rights in respect to his creatures or rather, as we
should then be, to his neighbours. This situation may have no terrors
for the thoughtless; but it evidently introduces something deeper than
Nature and something higher than God, depriving these words of the best
sense in which a philosopher might care to use them.

[Sidenote: Their opposite outlook.]

The divine and the material are contrasted points of reference required
by the actual. Reason, working on the immediate flux of appearances,
reaches these ideal realms and, resting in them, perforce calls them
realities. One--the realm of causes--supplies appearances with a basis
and calculable order; the other--the realm of truth and
felicity--supplies them with a standard and justification. Natural
society may accordingly be contrasted with ideal society, not because
Nature is not, logically speaking, ideal too, but because in natural
society we ally ourselves consciously with our origins and
surroundings, in ideal society with our purposes. There is an immense
difference in spirituality, in ideality of the moral sort, between
gathering or conciliating forces for action and fixing the ends which
action should pursue. Both fields are ideal in the sense that
intelligence alone could discover or exploit them; yet to call nature
ideal is undoubtedly equivocal, since its ideal function is precisely to
be the substance and cause of the given flux, a ground-work for
experience which, while merely inferred and potential, is none the less
mechanical and material. The ideality of nature is indeed of such a sort
as to be forfeited if the trusty instrument and true antecedent of human
life were not found there. We should be frivolous and inconstant, taking
our philosophy for a game and not for method in living, if having set
out to look for the causes and practical order of things, and having
found them, we should declare that they were not _really_ casual or
efficient, on the strange ground that our discovery of them had been a
feat of intelligence and had proved a priceless boon. The absurdity
could not be greater if in moral science, after the goal of all effort
had