The view that the right is the rational is quite consistent with the fact that, for those who have surplus energy, the right is the _onward_. The impulse to act, to become, to let out the life that rises within from obscure springs of power, is the need of needs, underlying all more special impulses; and this onward _Trieb_ must always count in our judgments of right: it is one of the things conscience has to make room for. There can be no harmony in a mental life which denies expression to this most persistent and fundamental of all instinctive tendencies: and consequently the equilibrium which the active mind seeks, and a sense of which is one with the sense of right, is never a state of rest, but an _equilibrium mobile_. Our situation may be said to resemble that of an acrobat balancing himself upon a rolling sphere, and enabled to stand upright only on condition of moving continually forward. The right never remains precisely the same two days in succession; but as soon as any particular state of right is achieved, the mental centre of gravity begins to move onward and away from it, so that we can hold our ground only by effecting a new adjustment. Hence the merely negative can never be the right to a vigorous person, or to a vigorous society, because the mind will not be content with anything so inadequate to its own nature. The good self must be what Emerson calls a “crescive self,” and the right must mark a track across the “waste abyss of possibility” and lead out the energies to congenial exertion. This idea is nowhere, perhaps, more cogently stated and illustrated than in M. Guyau’s penetrating work, “A Sketch of Morality.” He holds that the sense of duty is, in one aspect, a sense of a power to do things, and that this power tends in itself to create a sense of obligation. We can, therefore we must. “Obligation is an internal expansion—a need to complete our ideas by converting them into action.”[94] Even pain may be sought as part of that larger life which the growing mind requires. “Leopardi, Heine, or Lenau would probably not have exchanged those hours of anguish in which they composed their finest songs for the greatest possible enjoyment. Dante suffered.... Which of us would not undergo a similar suffering? Some heart-aches are infinitely sweet.”[95] And so with benevolence and what is called self-sacrifice. “... charity is but one with overflowing fecundity; it is like a maternity too large to be confined within the family. The mother’s breast needs life eager to empty it; the heart of the truly humane creature needs to be gentle and helpful to all.”[96] “The young man is full of enthusiasm; he is ready for every sacrifice because, in point of fact, it is necessary that he should sacrifice something of himself—that he should diminish himself to a certain extent; he is too full of life to live only for himself.”[97]