were seeking for. You have found that you are in possession of an ideal. You cannot get away from that ideal save by repeating the very process that has brought you to it. Your moral insight is attained, and the foundation of your doctrine is no longer a particular aim that is accepted by a mere caprice of one individual, but it is the necessary aim that arises in the mind of any one who actually realizes the warfare of the particular aims. It is the ideal of ideals. It is the absolute ideal that arises for you out of the consideration of the separate ideals. Each of them was relative to the mood of the man who happened to choose it; this Ideal is relative only to the insight that comprehends the whole moral world. Unable as we men are fully to realize just the actual nature of every single aim in the world of life, still we are able fully to realize certain conflicting aims; and, realizing this conflict, we can form for ourselves the notion of that absolute realization that means, as we have seen, first the skeptical despair of our last chapter, and then, by a deeper reflection, the ideal that we have just set forth above. Thus we no longer are capriciously deciding upon the worth of physical facts as such. We are passing a necessary judgment upon ideals as ideals.
And we have tried to show that this our resulting ideal is not a barren one. At first sight it seems so. At first sight one says: “This harmony is a self-contradictory dream.” But no, not self-contradictory is the dream; for, if we cannot perfectly realize this new ideal, if absolute harmony is unattainable, one
