iving after it, a perfection and a perfecting.
The combination at first sight appears impossible. Yet both characters
it must combine. Here again, I must confess that the idea of mere
Progress, even as achieved by our own efforts, seems to me to omit
something essential to an ideal of action--of what is worth while our
acting for. What is to be an ideal of action must have the character of
a fulfilment--something to be consumed, not merely eternally added to.
For this character of the (or any) ideal of action the best name is
fruition or enjoyment. And the defect in the conception of it as
Progress is that it seems to postpone this without a date.

Let us put this truth which we have discovered concerning Progress in a
nutshell, hiding or disregarding the internal contradiction. What is the
nature, what is the kind of reality, which we have learned to ascribe to
Progress (for we did pronounce it real and essentially capable of being
realized)? It is that it is fact, yet fact not made but in the making;
it is just the name for what is real only through and in the process of
becoming real or being realized. Now I have already elsewhere pointed
out that while a realization which is also a reality, or a reality which
is also a realization, is in nature or what is external to us a mystery
and a puzzle, it is just when we look inwards the open secret of our
being; in our life or action regarded from within, it appears as
something which is only dark because it is so close and familiar to us
that inspection of it is difficult, not because it is in itself opaque
or unintelligible. To its exemplification or illustration there we must
turn for light upon our problem.

Let us for the time disregard the pressure exercised upon us by the
suggestions of physical science, or even, I may add, popular and
imaginative or opinionative--which is Latin for 'dogmatic'--Religion,
and examine how Progress takes place, or is realized and real, within
our spirits, or that spirit which is within us. The inward process is
one by which that spirit is or is real only in the act or fact of being
or coming to be realized, or rather of realizing itself, and the way in
which it so becomes or makes itself real is by acknowledging its own
past, treating it as fact, recognizing its failures or imperfections
therein, projecting on the future an idea or ideal of itself, suggested
by those apprehended wants or defects, of what it might be, and using
that to