operation fortune becomes a function of conscience and the one desire of religious thinking and religious practice becomes to bring the two to a happy outcome, to abolish the conflicts. This desiderated abolition is salvation. It is expressed in the ideas of a fall, or a separation from heaven and reunion therewith. The machinery of this reunion of the divided, the reconversion of the differentiated into the same, consists of the furniture of religious symbols and ceremonials--myths, baptisms, sacraments, prayers, and sacrifices: and all these are at the same time instruments and expressions of desires. God is literally "the conservation of values."[95] "God's life in eternity," writes Aristotle, who here dominates the earlier tradition, "is that which we enjoy in our best moments, but are unable to possess permanently: its very being is delight. And as actual being is delight, so the various functions of waking, perceiving, thinking, are to us the pleasantest parts of our life. Perfect and absolute thought is just this absolute vision of perfection."[96] Even the least somnambulistic of the transcendental philosophies has repeated, not improved upon Aristotle. "The highest conceptions that I get from experience of what goodness and beauty are," Royce declares, "the noblest life that I can imagine, the completest blessedness that I can think, all these are but faint suggestions of a truth that is infinitely realized in the Divine, that knows all truth. Whatever perfection there is suggested in these things, that he must fully know and experience."