e is no change from less good to more good
possible within it, and which, if it can be said to progress at all,
only, in Milton's magnificent words, 'progresses the dateless and
irrevoluble circle of its own perfections, joining inseparable hands
with joy and bliss in over-measure for ever'. Once this ideal has
presented itself to our hopes or desires, it degrades by comparison with
it to a second-best, the former ideal of endless development from lower
to higher. What we want and seek is to be there, to have done with
getting there. 'Here is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the
cup with the roses around it.' Compared with this, how disconsolate a
prospect is that 'of the sea that hath no shore beyond it, set in all
the sea'--the endless voyage or quest. Not Progress is or can be the
end, but achievement and the enjoyment of it. The progress is towards
and for the end; the end is the supreme good and the progress is only
good because of it, because it is on the way that leads to it, the way
we are content to travel only because it leads there. Once more, and on
still surer grounds, we must pronounce what we have come to know as
Progress to be no possible ideal of action. What draws us on is the hope
of something to be attained in and by the progress. To take Progress,
which on the one hand is a fact and on the other is an incomplete fact,
to be the end of our striving and our doing is to acquiesce in a
self-contradiction.

Yet the counter-ideal of a state in which we shall simply rest from our
labours and sit down to enjoy the fruits of them does not promise
satisfaction either, and so cannot be the end or ideal. Our desire and
our endeavour is not for a moveless, changeless, undeveloping
perfection. In fact, so often as the dream of such a state attained has
presented itself, it has to thoughtful minds appeared anything but
attractive or desirable. Our desire is to go on, and for that we are
willing to pay a price--nay, it is for more than merely to go on, it is
to advance and increase in perfection, so much so that the ideal itself
once more slews round into its opposite and the search appears worth
more than the attainment. It seems that we were not on the other view so
wholly wrong, but must try so to frame our ideal of action as to unite
both characters and satisfy both demands at once, so that it shall be at
once a state and a movement or process, an achievement and a progress, a
rest or quiet and a str