My answer to these difficulties must at this stage be very brief and incomplete.  That the moral good, if attained, should itself prove vain is a plain self-contradiction.  For moral good has no meaning except in so far as it is conceived as the highest good.  The question.  “Why should I be moral,” has no answer, because it is self-contradictory.  The moral ideal contains its justification in itself, and requires to lean on nothing else.

But it is not easy to prove that it is attainable.  In one sense it is not attainable, at least under the conditions of human life which fall within our experience, from which alone we have a right to speak.  For, as I shall strive to show in a succeeding chapter, the essence of man’s life as spiritual, that is as intelligent and moral, is its self-realizing activity.  Intellectual and moral life is progress, although it is the progress of an ideal which is real and complete, the return of the infinite to itself through the finite.  The cessation of the progress of the ideal in man, whereby man interprets the world in terms of himself and makes it the instrument of his purposes, is intellectual and moral death.  From one point of view, therefore, this spiritual life, or moral and intellectual activity, is inspired at every step by the consciousness of a “beyond” not possessed, of an unsolved contradiction between the self and the not-self, of a good that ought to be and is not.  The last word, or rather the last word but one, regarding man is “failure.”

But failure is the last word but one, as the poet well knew.  “What’s come to perfection perishes,” he tells us.  From this point of view the fact that perfection is not reached, merely means that the process is not ended.  “It seethes with the morrow for us and more.”  The recognition of failure implies more effort and higher progress, and contains a suggestion of an absolute good, and even a proof of its active presence.  “The beyond,” for knowledge and morality, is the Land of Promise.  And the promise is not a false one; for the “land” is possessed.  The recognition of the fact to be known, the statement of the problem, is the first step in its solution; and the consciousness of the moral ideal not attained is the first step in its self-actualizing progress.  Had man not come so far, he would not have known the further difficulty, or recognized the higher good.  To say that the moral ideal is never attained, is thus only a half-truth.  We must add to it the fact that it is always being attained; nay, that it is always present as an active reality, attaining itself, evolving its own content.  Or, to return to the previous metaphor, the land of promise is possessed, although the possession always reveals a still better beyond, which is again a land of promise.