moral ideal. A mathematical axiom,
and the statement of a physical law, express what is true; but they do
not occupy the same place in our mind as a moral principle. Such a
principle is an ideal, as well as an idea. It is an idea which has
causative potency in it. It supplies motives, it is an incentive to
action, and, though in one sense a thing of the future, it is also the
actual spring and source of present activity. In so far as the agent
acts, as Kant put it, not according to laws, but according to an _idea_
of law (and a responsible agent always acts in this manner), the ideal
is as truly actualized in him as the physical law is actualized in the
physical fact, or the vegetable life in the plant. In fact, the ideal of
a moral being is his life. All his actions are its manifestations. And,
just as the physical fact is not seen as it really is, nor its reality
proved, till science has penetrated through the husk of the sensuous
phenomenon, and grasped it in thought as an instance of a law; so an
individual's actions are not understood, and can have no moral meaning
whatsoever, except in the light of the purpose which gave them being. We
know the man only when we know his creed. His reality is what he
believes in; that is, it is his ideal.

It is the consciousness that the ideal is the real which explains the
fact of contrition. To become morally awakened is to become conscious of
the vanity and nothingness of the past life, as confronted with the new
ideal implied in it. The past life is something to be cast aside as
false show, just because the self that experienced it was not realized
in it. It is for this reason that the moral agent sets himself against
it, and desires to annihilate all its claims upon him by undergoing its
punishment, and drinking to the dregs its cup of bitterness. Thus his
true life lies in the realization of his ideal, and his advance towards
it is his coming to himself. Only in attaining to it does he attain
reality, and the only realization possible for him in the present is
just the consciousness of the potency of the ideal. To him to live is to
realize his ideal. It is a power that irks, till it finds expression in
moral habits that accord with its nature, _i.e._, till the spirit has,
out of its environment, created a body adequate to itself.

The condemnation of self which characterizes all moral life and is the
condition of moral progress, must not, therefore, be regarded as a
complet