THE UNION OF ALL IDEALS. 447 



the meaning of that standard. If we know that the 

 real world aspires, and as yet aspires unsuccessfully, 

 to be in the strictest sense of the word, if as yet 

 reality only becomes and contains an element of Not- 

 Being, we must assert that eventually it will really 

 be, and really realize the ideal whereby we know it. 

 We must assert, in other words, the reality of perfect 

 Being in order to justify the assertion of the reality 

 of knowledge. And so the conditions and nature 

 of such Being which may be determined by our 

 thought (for Being is a category of our thought) 

 must be binding on all reality. 



Being, then, is an ideal which the world-process 

 must realize, and as one of our ideals and like all 

 our ideals, it must as yet be a mere form, the real 

 content of which can be filled in only by the con- 

 summation of the process of Evolution. It must be 

 experienced to be understood, and we can determine 

 only the formal aspects to which it m.ust conform. 

 Perfect activity can be described only as the perfec- 

 tion of the activities of life, and most of these are so 

 imperfect that their attainment of their ideal and 

 their realization of perfection would absorb them in 

 something more divine but different. 



§ 9. Thus, though we may describe the perfect 

 activity of complete adjustment as the supreme End 

 of the process of Evolution, as the all-embracing 

 culmination of all the activities and ideals of life, we 

 must yet not overlook the fact that, strictly speaking, 

 it would transcend them. If we regard Knowledge, 

 Goodness, Beauty and Happiness as the supreme 

 ideals of life, as the ideals respectively of the 

 intellectual, the moral, the cesthetic, and the sen- 

 sitive consciousness, we must say that the perfect 

 activity of Being includes all these, and yet is some- 



