To say that the ideal is real sounds paradoxical. It seems like saying that to have the idea of a shilling is the same thing as possessing a shilling. That is a patent absurdity, but no one will maintain that it is an absurdity to say that we ought to try to be better than we are. On the contrary, everyone will admit that it is a truth, and a truth of the highest importance, of greater value and greater significance for our highest interests than, say, the law of gravitation, or any statement as to the ways in which matter and motion are redistributed. When the desire to amend our life is strong upon us, when we are most conscious of the heavy difference between actual amendment and amendment in idea alone, then we are most certain of the reality of the moral ideal as a fact, both of immediate consciousness at the moment and of permanent significance for us and for all men. To say that our moral convictions correspond to no real facts is simply to deny to them any validity at all. To say that the facts to which they correspond are real, but are purely subjective, being but moods, and often passing moods, of the individual, is merely to say that our moral convictions are illusions and right-doing only fancy. Nor do we mend matters if we add that all men are more or less subject to these moods, that right and wrong are purely human institutions; for if their value in the individual is naught, their existence in the multitude does but add to ciphers ciphers. On the other hand, if the moral ideal is no figment of man's imagination, if its existence does not come and go with his fitful moral struggles, then its permanent abode, the centre from which it manifests itself, must be in some permanent intelligence at the centre of things.