is conscious and their method teachable. In perfect art the whole idea
is creative and exists only to be embodied, while every part of the
product is rational and gives delightful expression to that idea. Like
art, again, the Life of Reason is not a power but a result, the
spontaneous expression of liberal genius in a favouring environment.
Both art and reason have natural sources and meet with natural checks;
but when a process is turned successfully into an art, so that its
issues have value and the ideas that accompany it become practical and
cognitive, reflection, finding little that it cannot in some way justify
and understand, begins to boast that it directs and has created the
world in which it finds itself so much at home. Thus if art could extend
its sphere to include every activity in nature, reason, being everywhere
exemplified, might easily think itself omnipotent. This ideal, far as it
is from actual realisation, has so dazzled men, that in their religion
and mythical philosophy they have often spoken as if it were already
actual and efficient. This anticipation amounts, when taken seriously,
to a confusion of purposes with facts and of functions with causes, a
confusion which in the interests of wisdom and progress it is important
to avoid; but these speculative fables, when we take them for what they
are--poetic expressions of the ideal--help us to see how deeply rooted
this ideal is in man's mind, and afford us a standard by which to
measure his approaches to the rational perfection of which he dreams.
For the Life of Reason, being the sphere of all human art, is man's
imitation of divinity.

[Sidenote: It has a natural basis which makes it definable.]

To study such an ideal, dimly expressed though it be in human existence,
is no prophetic or visionary undertaking. Every genuine ideal has a
natural basis; anyone may understand and safely interpret it who is