1100 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
Space, than we are this very Here and Now. What we fear 
is that the Idea of the Infinite may be found incompatible with 
the Idea of the Human. 
Yet we aspire. 
Tt is the moment of thought that redresses the wavering balance. 
To see ourselves swh specie acternitatis, all human interests 
being united and the whole Human set over against the world, 
to take the last values and decide what it is that accords with 
Eternity—whatitis that deserves to last ; such is the reconciliation, 
such is our deliverance ; the moment of Thought, no trimming of 
fear-bred tales. 
We cannot always content ourselves with fragments. When 
we broke up the old unity and framed the first concept, we began 
that journey towards the last Unity of World and Human, the 
great Fact and Idea in one, made up of all those countless rapports 
between ourselves and Nature, which we now separately follow out. 
Such separate maimed human processes are only justifiable as 
Vorstufen to this synthesis. 
Whatever image we make to ourselves of this Idea is called by 
a name soiled by all ignoble usage—the Ideal. Every human 
attempt at humanisation of the Universe has hitherto shaped its 
Ideal, and by the satisfaction which this afforded—not necessarily 
to the mass—has justified itself ; but all have hitherto been found 
imperfect, sometimes perverse. To offer me the atom as a satis- 
factory ideal, as the trophy of a real human victory—how perverse! 
For what trouble does it cost to find the link between us and outer 
things, the interest we feel towards them, by refining on which 
this spectre is conjured up ? 
Tf not time and space, at least power is lacking to adumbrate- 
that Idea. Yet we are not left without some indication of that 
state in which it would be given in direct intuition, where thought 
would be like quivering flame, inseparable from sense, emotion, and 
imagination. Of such perfect Life all beautiful things by their 
perfection—limited, “tis true—are the fitting symbols, and the 
creators of Beauty in all its shapes the fitting prophets. The Eden- 
thought, the dream of a Golden Age, strangely offered to an 
unimaginative century in the shape of a philosophy which denied 
reason, civilisation, progress, is never absent. 
To say, with that prophet and others, that our present imperfect 
life is a disease, were, perhaps, too glaring a substitution of Idea 
for Fact, an exaggeration, a reductio ad absurdum of the Human 
Procedure—the Human Fallacy, as we might cheerfully agree to 
call it. 
No. 10.—SOCIALISM IN EDUCATION. 
By P. F. Rowranps, B.A. 
(Read Tuesduy, January 11, 1898.) 
