Now, empirically and metaphysically, no one interest is more excellent than any other. Repressed or patent, each is, whether in a completely favorable environment or in a completely indifferent universe, or before the bar of an absolute justice, or under the domination of an absolute and universal good, entitled to its free fulfilment and perfect maintenance. Each is a form of the good; the essential content of each is good. That any are not fulfilled, but repressed, is a fact to be recorded, not an appearance to be explained away. And it may turn out that the existence of the fact may explain the effort to explain it away. For where interests are in conflict with each other or with reality, and where the loser is not extirpated, its revenge may be just this self-fulfilment in unreality, in idea, which philosophies of absolute values offer it. Dreams, some of the arts, religion, and philosophy may indeed be considered as such fulfilments, worlds of luxuriant self-realization of all that part of our nature which the harsh conjunctions with the environment overthrow and suppress. Sometimes abortive self-expressions of frustrated desires, sometimes ideal compensations for the shortcomings of existence, they are always equally ideal reconstructions of the surrounding evil of the world into forms of the good. And because they are compensations in idea, they are substituted for existence, appraised as "true," and "good," and "beautiful," and "real," while the experiences which have suppressed the desires they realize are condemned as illusory and unreal. In them humanity has its freest play and amplest expression. III This has been, and still to a very great extent remains, most specifically true of philosophy. The environment with which philosophy concerns itself is nothing less than the whole universe; its content is, within the history of its dominant tradition, absolutely general and abstract; it is, of all great human enterprises, even religion, least constrained by the direction and march of events or the mandate of circumstance. Like music, it expresses most truly the immediate and intrinsic interests of the mind, its native bias and its inward goal. It has been constituted, for this reason, of the so-called "normative" sciences, envisaging the non-existent as real, forcing upon nature pure values, forms of the spirit incident to the total life of this world, unmixed with baser matter. To formulate ultimate standards, to be completely and utterly lyrical has been the prerogative of philosophy alone. Since these standards reappear in all other reconstructions of the environment and most clearly in art and in religion, it is pertinent to enumerate them, and to indicate briefly their bearing on existence.