rganism to maintain its organic
balance; it is as if a balloon, compressed on one side, bulged on the
other.

Ideas, then, bear three types of relations to organic life, relations
socially incarnated in traditional art, religion, and philosophy. First
of all they may be an expression of innate capacities, the very essence
of the freedom of life. In certain arts, such as music, they are just
this. In the opposite case they may be the effect of the compression of
innate capacities, an outcome of obstruction to the free low of life.
They are then compensatory. Where expressive ideas are confluent with
existence, compensatory ideas diverge from existence; they become pure
value-forms whose paramount realization is traditional philosophy. Their
rise and motivation in both these forms is unconscious. They are ideas,
but not yet intelligence. The third instance falls between these
original two. The idea is neither merely a free expression of innate
capacities, nor a compensation for their obstruction or compression.
Arising as the effect of a disharmony, it develops as an enchannelment
of organic powers directed to the conversion of the disharmony into an
adjustment. It does not _use up_ vital energies like the expressive
idea, it is not an abortion of them, like the compensatory idea. It uses
them, and is aware that it uses them--that is, it is a program of action
upon the environment, of conversion of values into existences. Such an
idea has the differentia of intelligence. It is creative; it actually
converts nature into forms appropriate to human nature. It abolishes the
Otherworld of the compensatory tradition in philosophy by incarnating it
in this world; it abolishes the Otherworld of the religionist, rendered
important by belittling the actual one, by restoring the working
relationships between thoughts and things. This restoration develops as
reconstruction of the world in fact. It consists specifically of the art
and science which compose the efficacious enterprises of history and of
which the actual web of our civilization is spun.

Manifest in its purity in art, it attends unconsciously both religion
and philosophy, for the strands of life keep interweaving, and whatever
is, in our collective being, changes and is changed by whatever else may
be, that is in reach. The life of reason is initially unconscious
because it can learn only by living to seek a reason for life. Once it
discovers that it can become self-mai