ial unreality, while at the same
time those who put it thus, profess to see through the illusion and to
enjoy moments of insight which recognize its nullity. This way of
putting it in my judgement intolerably misconceives and misrepresents
the truth.

Our ideals of action must be self-made or self-begotten, but yet they
must be congruent with known fact; but the manner of such congruence is
hard to see, hard to express. Ideals cannot be themselves facts, and
therefore cannot be known, but on the other hand they cannot be mere
imaginations or suppositions or beliefs, still less, of course,
illusions or delusions. They are not visionary, and the apprehension of
them is a sort or degree of perception. They point beyond themselves to
some higher fact which is not cognizable by our senses or perhaps our
understanding, but which is yet genuinely cognizable and so in some high
sense fact. Yet they are not, as we envisage them, the fact to which
they point, but a substitute for or representative of that--an
anticipation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind
or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'--a term I do not
like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of
a certain incumbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or
adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is
that their reality--it seems a paradox that an ideal should possess
'reality'--consists in their suggestiveness of modes of action and their
applicability to it, all this being supported by the conception of a
state of affairs beyond and around us which makes it 'right'.

If all this is so, Progress as an ideal of action cannot be precisely
identical with Progress as a fact or object of actual or possible
knowledge. We can never know what we are aiming at. But though
different, the two are and must be congruent, and this may be enough to
justify us in using the one name for the two. Unless there were Progress
as fact everywhere and always in the universe--outside us--in Nature and
History, and unless we took ourselves genuinely to apprehend this, we
could not form the practical ideal of Progress, or at least the ideal
could not be right. But the difference remains, and we must be prepared
for and allow for it; though we can use the knowledge we obtain of the
fact of Progress to control and guide our formulation of the practical
ideal, we cannot identify the one with the other. Our i