his advance towards it is his coming to himself.  Only in attaining to it does he attain reality, and the only realization possible for him in the present is just the consciousness of the potency of the ideal.  To him to live is to realize his ideal.  It is a power that irks, till it finds expression in moral habits that accord with its nature, i.e., till the spirit has, out of its environment, created a body adequate to itself.

The condemnation of self which characterizes all moral life and is the condition of moral progress, must not, therefore, be regarded as a complete truth.  For the very condemnation implies the actual presence of something better.  Both of the terms—­both the criterion and the fact which is condemned by it—­fall within the same individual life.  Man cannot, therefore, without injustice, condemn himself in all that he is; for the condemnation is itself a witness to the activity of that good of which he despairs.  Hence, the threatening majesty of the moral imperative is nothing but the shadow of man’s own dignity; and moral contrition, and even the complete despair of the pessimistic theory, when rightly understood, are recognized as unwilling witnesses to the authority and the actuality of the highest good.  And, on the other hand, the highest good cannot be regarded as a mere phantom, without nullifying all our condemnation of the self and the world.

The legitimate deduction from the height of man’s moral ideal is thus found to be, not, as Carlyle thought, the weakness and worthlessness of human nature, but its promise and native dignity:  and in a healthy moral consciousness it produces, not despair, but faith and joy.  For, as has been already suggested in a previous chapter, the authority of the moral law over man is rooted in man’s endowment.  Its imperative is nothing but the voice of the future self, bidding the present self aspire, while its reproof is only the expression of a moral aspiration which has misunderstood itself.  Contrition is not a bad moral state which should bring despair, but a good state, full of promise of one that is still better.  It is, in fact, just the first step which the ideal takes in its process of self-realization:  “the sting that bids nor sit, nor stand, but go!”

The moral ideal thus, like every other ideal, even that which we regard as present in natural life, contains a certain guarantee of its own fulfilment.  It is essentially an active thing, an energy, a movement upwards.  It may, indeed, be urged that the guarantee is imperfect.  Ideals tend to self-realization, but the tendency may remain unfulfilled.  Men have some ideals which they never reach, and others which, at first sight at least, it were better for them not to reach.  The goal may never be attained, or it may prove “a ruin like the rest.”  And, as long as man is moral, the ideal is not, and cannot be, fully reached, Morality necessarily implies a rift within human nature, a contradiction between what is and what ought to be; although neither the rift nor the contradiction is absolute.  There might seem for this reason to be no way of bringing optimism and ethics together, of reconciling what is and what ought to be.