ween human nature
and nature, primitively articulated in consciousness and conduct by the
distress engendered through the fact that the food supply depends upon
the march of the seasons,[94] becomes later assimilated to the inner
conflict between opposing interests, wishes, and desires. Finally, the
whole so constituted gets expressed in the idea of sin. That idea makes
outward prosperity dependent upon inward purity, although it often
transfers the locus of the prosperity to another world. Through its
operation fortune becomes a function of conscience and the one desire of
religious thinking and religious practice becomes to bring the two to a
happy outcome, to abolish the conflicts. This desiderated abolition is
salvation. It is expressed in the ideas of a fall, or a separation from
heaven and reunion therewith. The machinery of this reunion of the
divided, the reconversion of the differentiated into the same, consists
of the furniture of religious symbols and ceremonials--myths, baptisms,
sacraments, prayers, and sacrifices: and all these are at the same time
instruments and expressions of desires. God is literally "the
conservation of values."[95] "God's life in eternity," writes Aristotle,
who here dominates the earlier tradition, "is that which we enjoy in our
best moments, but are unable to possess permanently: its very being is
delight. And as actual being is delight, so the various functions of
waking, perceiving, thinking, are to us the pleasantest parts of our
life. Perfect and absolute thought is just this absolute vision of
perfection."[96]

Even the least somnambulistic of the transcendental philosophies has
repeated, not improved upon Aristotle. "The highest conceptions that I
get from experience of what goodness and beauty are," Royce declares,
"the noblest life that I can imagine, the completest blessedness that I
can think, all these are but faint suggestions of a truth that is
infinitely realized in the Divine, that knows all truth. Whatever
perfection there is suggested in these things, that he must fully know
and experience."

But this aesthetic excellence, this maximum of ideality is in and by
itself inadequate. God, to be God, must _work_. He is first of all the
invisible socius, the ever-living witness, in whose eyes the
disharmonies and injustices of this life are enregistered, and who in
the life everlasting redresses the balances and adjusts the account.
Even his grace is not unconditional;