226 HUMANISM xn 



the whole of experience and obstructs the portal that 

 should lead from knowledge to reality. At present, then, 

 we must admit that nothing is ever all it might be. If, 

 however, we imagined any being overcoming this defect 

 and attaining to a complete and harmonious self-expression 

 in its activities, how could it any longer even suggest a 

 shadowy region of possibilities bound up with its actual 

 self and inhering behind the scenes in a substratum which 

 is the substance both of the actual and of the potential ? 

 In the coincidence of the actual and the potential which 

 the realisation of the latter would involve, there would 

 vanish our antitheses of essence and accident, of 

 ideal and real, of appearance and reality. For the 

 appearance would have become the reality, and the 

 real would have fully appeared. 



Such is the ideal of Being Aristotle has attributed 

 to the divine perfection, such the full import of his 

 evepiyeia aKivr)&amp;lt;rias. Nor is there any reason for confining 

 this perfection to the Deity : we can quite well conceive 

 a cosmos composed of beings whose activities had thus 

 transcended change. Indeed I cannot see how in the 

 end perfection is conceivable in any cheaper way : it is 

 only in a universe made up of a finite number of con 

 stituents, each of which is individually perfect, that 

 perfection can be predicated of the whole, and that the 

 perfection of any part can be secured against the irruption 

 of intrusive discords. Whether of course there is any 

 possibility of actually realising any such ideal is quite 

 another question, and no one could be more keenly 

 conscious than myself of the bitter contrast between such 

 dreams of metaphysics and the stern facts of our daily 

 life. But once upon a time our fairest facts, our most 

 uncontroverted truths, were but the visions of a dream, 

 divined by a prescience that slowly hardened into 

 science : l and so perchance even dreams like these may 

 come true, or rather may be made to come true, if we try. 

 It is, moreover, certain that if we dismiss such thoughts as 

 idle dreams, dreams they will remain, and no end will ever 



1 See Axioms as Postulates, passim. 



