that it is possible to reach a position outside the realm of being, from which it may be condemned as a whole.  But the rift between actual and ideal must fall within the real or intelligible world, do what the pessimists will; and a condemnation of man which is not based on a principle realized by humanity, is a fiction of abstract thought, which lays stress on the actuality of the imperfect and treats the perfect as if it were as good as nothing, which it cannot be.  In other words, this way of regarding human life isolates the passing phenomenon, and does not look to that which reveals itself in it and causes it to pass away.  Confining ourselves, however, for the present, to the ideal in morality, we can easily see that, in that sphere at least, the actual and ideal change places; and that the latter contrasts with the former as the real with the phenomenal.  For, in the first place, the moral ideal is something more than a mere idea not yet realized.  It is more even than a true idea; for no mere knowledge, however true, has such intimate relation to the self-consciousness of man as his moral ideal.  A mathematical axiom, and the statement of a physical law, express what is true; but they do not occupy the same place in our mind as a moral principle.  Such a principle is an ideal, as well as an idea.  It is an idea which has causative potency in it.  It supplies motives, it is an incentive to action, and, though in one sense a thing of the future, it is also the actual spring and source of present activity.  In so far as the agent acts, as Kant put it, not according to laws, but according to an idea of law (and a responsible agent always acts in this manner), the ideal is as truly actualized in him as the physical law is actualized in the physical fact, or the vegetable life in the plant.  In fact, the ideal of a moral being is his life.  All his actions are its manifestations.  And, just as the physical fact is not seen as it really is, nor its reality proved, till science has penetrated through the husk of the sensuous phenomenon, and grasped it in thought as an instance of a law; so an individual’s actions are not understood, and can have no moral meaning whatsoever, except in the light of the purpose which gave them being.  We know the man only when we know his creed.  His reality is what he believes in; that is, it is his ideal.

It is the consciousness that the ideal is the real which explains the fact of contrition.  To become morally awakened is to become conscious of the vanity and nothingness of the past life, as confronted with the new ideal implied in it.  The past life is something to be cast aside as false show, just because the self that experienced it was not realized in it.  It is for this reason that the moral agent sets himself against it, and desires to annihilate all its claims upon him by undergoing its punishment, and drinking to the dregs its cup of bitterness.  Thus his true life lies in the realization of his ideal, and