226 HUMANISM 



XII 



realized all its potentialities, and our difficulties disappear. 

 For we shall then have transcended the conditions which 

 engender the illusion of an inscrutable background of 

 * substance. At present our existence seems immersed 

 in a sea of possibilities which are the objects of our 

 unceasing hopes and fears : nothing is ever quite all that 

 it is capable of being ; nothing can ever wholly realize 

 itself in any single moment. Hence the potential every 

 where extends beyond the actual, and the shadow of an 

 incalculable and inexplicable Thing-in-itself is cast over 

 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 realization of the latter would involve, there would 

 vanish our antitheses of essence and accident, of 

 ideal and real, of appearance and reality. For the 

 &amp;lt; 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 

 fvepyeia aKivr)a-ia&amp;lt;;. 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 realizing any such ideal is quite 

 another question, and no one could be more keenly 



