ally developed.
But taken in general, they constitute the changeless pattern
of human nature, and fix the conditions and the limits of
action.

But while these universal traits determine what man may
do, and fix definitively the boundaries of human possibility,
within these limits the race has a wide choice of ideals and
attainments. The standards of what man will and should do,
within the boundaries of the nature which is his inheritance,
are to be found not in his original impulses, but in his mind
and imagination. The human being is gifted with the ability
to imagine a future more desirable than the present, and to
contrive ingeniously in behalf of anticipated or imagined
goods.

These anticipated goods we call ideals, and these ideals
arise, in the last analysis, out of the initial and inborn hungers
and cravings of men. "Intellect is of the same flesh and blood
with all the instincts, a brother whose superiority lies in his
power to appreciate, harmonize, and save them all." The
function of reason is not to set itself over against men's original
desires, but to envisage ideals and devise instruments
whereby they may all, so far as nature allows, be fulfilled.

Man's reason, then, which has its roots in his instincts, is
the means of their harmonious fulfillment. It attempts, in
the various fields of experience, to effect an adjustment
between man's competing desires, and between man and his
environment. If instincts were left each to its own free course,
they would all be frustrated; if man did not learn reflectively
to control his environment, and to make it subserve his own
ends, he would be a helpless pygmy soon obliterated by the
incomparably more powerful forces of Nature.

These various attempts of man to effect an adjustment of
his passions with one another, and his life to his environment,
may be described as the "Career of Reason." In this career
man has formulated many ideals, not a small number of which
have led him into error, disillusion, and unhappiness.
Sometimes they have misled him by promising him fulfillments
that were in the nature of things unattainable. They have
added to the real evils of life a longing after impossible goods,
goods which an informed intelligence would early have dismissed
as unattainable. Man has disappointed himself by
counting on joys which, had he been less incorrigibly addicted
to imaginative illusions, he should never have expected.
Sometimes he has framed ide