xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 227 



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 ; 1 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 

 come to the conflict and the friction that wear out our 

 world ; whereas, if we consent to look for possibilities of 

 harmony, our willingness may be the first condition of 

 success. And even for the proximate purposes of 

 ordinary life, there is perhaps some practical value in the 

 contemplation of a metaphysical ideal which can stimulate 

 us to be active, and to develop all our powers to the 

 utmost, while at the same time warning us that such 

 self-realization must assume the form, not of a hideous, 

 barbarous, and neurotic restlessness, nor of an infinite (and 

 therefore futile) struggle, but of an activity which, 

 transcending change and time, preserves itself in an 

 harmonious equipoise. 



1 See Axioms as Postulates, passim. 



