196 £SSAVS IN PHILOSOPHY 



common secret as of the specific secret of each ; 

 we would know zvJiat unity of tvJiat variety is 

 present in each. 



Well, if we press the matter, we shall discover 

 that nothing affords any key to either secret except 

 the nature of our own human personality ; that the 

 trinity we cannot but observe in beauty, truth, and 

 good is counterposed to a trinity in our own being 

 as persons, and that the distinctions in it are 

 dependent on this correlation, get their definition 

 from it, and are in so far founded upon it. We 

 too, as persons (or beings rationally conscious), are 

 existent in a triune synthesis — an individual unity 

 of intellect, emotion, and will ; a unity in which the 

 supreme illumination of knowledge blends and sub- 

 ordinates the capacity to feel and the power to act. 

 The power to act and the capacity to feel find 

 their only satisfying object, therefore, in the object 

 that alone can satisfy the sovereign light within us; 

 and so our whole being, in all its three constitu- 

 ents, turns an undivided aim upon the Eternal Per- 

 fection — the one and only Supreme Ideal, who is 

 at once the Supreme Beauty and the Supreme 

 Good, and thence the Supreme Truth, just because 

 he is the satisfaction at once of our sentiment, our 

 will, and our reason. Beauty, truth, and good are 

 therefore nothing more and nothing less than the 

 forms in which the one Supreme Ideal who defines 



