supply itself with both energy and guidance, drawing from its
own past both strength and light. In all this it acts autonomously, out
of itself, and creates both the requisite light and the indispensable
force, making its very limitations into new sources and reservoirs of
both.

We do not sufficiently note and hold and use the indubitable truth that,
in contradistinction to what we call Nature, the forces of the spirit
reinforce and re-create themselves in their use, are in their use not
consumed but reinvigorated, not dissipated or degraded but recollected
and elevated, not expended but enhanced. There is in the realm of spirit
which is our nature and our world no law of either the conservation or
the degradation of energy. We must not allow ourselves to be brow-beaten
by arguments drawn from the obscurer region of physical and external
nature. We know ourselves to be energies or energizing powers which
increase and do not waste by exercise. That is what we ought to mean by
saying that we are wills and not forces, spiritual not physical or
natural beings. If need be to confirm ourselves in this knowledge, let
us think of what takes place, has taken place in the advance of
knowledge, and particularly of the most important kind of knowledge,
viz. self-knowledge, how we make it by our reflection upon what we have
already in respect of it achieved, recognize how it or we have fallen
short or over-shot our mark, define what is required to make good its
deficiencies, and find ourselves thereby already in actual possession of
the preconceived supplement. The real, the fact, what is attained or
accomplished in and by us, prescribes and facilitates, or rather
supplies, its own missing complement of perfection. The process carries
itself on, the progress realizes itself, the ideal translates itself
into the fact or actuality: it accomplishes itself and yet it is the
doing of our very self, of the spirit within us. All this is not merely
our doing, it is our being, it is the process by which we make our
minds, our souls, our very selves or self.

That man is essentially an, or rather the, ideal-forming animal (or
rather spirit) has long been noted, and also that the formation of
ideals is an indispensable factor in his progress, which is his life and
very being. But all the same, this is sometimes put in such a way as to
make action, or at least human action, a dispensable accident in the
universe, an ineffective and unsubstant