While, therefore, it must always remain true that knowledge does not reach absolute reality, nor morality absolute goodness, this cannot be used as an argument against optimism, except on the presupposition that mental and moral activity are a disease.  And this is a contradiction in terms.  If the ideal is in itself good, the process whereby it is attained is good; if the process in itself is evil, the ideal it seeks is evil, and therefore the condemnation of the actual by reference to it is absurd.  And, on the other hand, to postulate as best the identity of ideal and actual, so that no process is necessary, is to assume a point of view where both optimism and pessimism are meaningless, for there is no criterion.  As Aristotle teaches us, we have no right either to praise or to blame the highest.  A process, such as morality is, which is not the self-manifestation of an actual idea, and an ideal which does not reveal its potencies in its passing forms, are both fictions of one-sided thought.  The process is not the ideal, but its manifestation; and the ideal is not the process, but the principle which is its source and guide.

But if the process cannot be thus immediately identified with the ideal, or “man take the place of God,” or “human self-consciousness be confused with the absolute self-consciousness,” far less can they be separated.  The infinitely high ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect goodness, implied in the Christian command, “Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” is an ideal, just because the unity of what is and what ought to be is deeper than their difference.  The recognition of the limit of our knowledge, or the imperfection of our moral character, is a direct witness to the fact that there is more to be known and a better to be achieved.  The negative implies the affirmative, and is its effect.  Man’s confession of the limitation of his knowledge is made on the supposition that the universe of facts, in all its infinitely rich complexity, is meant to be known; and his confession of moral imperfection is made by reference to a good which is absolute, and which yet may be and ought to be his.  The good in morality is necessarily supreme and perfect.  A good that is “merely human,” “relative to man’s nature,” in the sense of not being true goodness, is a phantom of confused thinking.  Morality demands “the good,” and not a simulacrum or make-shift.  The distinction between right and wrong, and with it all moral aspiration, contrition, and repentance, would otherwise become meaningless.  What can a seeming good avail to a moral agent?  There is no better or worse among merely apparent excellencies, and of phantoms it matters not which is chosen.  And, in a similar way, the distinction between true and false in knowledge, and the common condemnation of human knowledge as merely of phenomena, implies the absolute unity of thought and being, and the knowledge of that unity as a fact.  There is no true or false amongst merely apparent facts.