Such a conception embraces all the separate aspects of our nature each in its place, and each from its own angle supreme. Love and knowledge inseparable and fundamental, freedom and happiness essential conditions of healthy growth, personality developed with the development of the greater personality in which we all live and grow. This greater personality is at its highest immeasurably above us, and has no assignable limits in time or in capacity to know, to love, or to enjoy. We cannot fix its origin at any known point in the birth of planets, nor does the cooling of our sun nor of all the suns seem to put any limit in our imagination to the continuous unfolding of life like our own. While thus practically infinite, the ideal of human nature is revealed to us concretely in countless types of goodness and truth and beauty which we may know and love and imitate. To all it is open to study the lineaments of this ideal in the records and figures of the past; to most it is revealed in some fellow beings known in life. From these, the human spirits which embody the strivings, the hopes, the conquered failings of the past, we may form our better selves and build the humanity of the future. There is a famous and magnificent passage in Dante's _Purgatorio_ which Catholic commentators interpret in sacramental terms but we may well apply in a wider sense to the progress of the human spirit towards the ideal. It occurs at that crucial point where the ascending poet leaves the circles of sad repentance to reach the higher regions of growing light. 'And when we came there, to the first step, it was of white marble, so polished that I could see myself just as I am. 'And the second was coloured dark, a rugged stone, cracked lengthwise and across. And the third piled above it was flaming porphyry, red like the blood from a vein. 'Above this one was the angel of God, sitting on the threshold, bright as a diamond. 'Up the three steps my master led me with goodwill and then he said, "Beg humbly that he unlock the door."'[4] Like this, the path man has to tread is not an easy progress. But he is rising all the time and he rises on steps of his own past. He sees reflected in them the image of himself, and he sees too the deep faults in his nature, and the rough surface of his path through time. The last step, tinged by his own blood, gives access to a higher dwelling, firm and bright and leading higher still. But it is open only after a long ascent, and to the human spirit that has worked faithfully, with love for his comrades and leaders, and reverence for the laws which bind both the world and him. BOOKS FOR REFERENCE John Grote, _Examination of Utilitarian Philosophy_. Kant, _Principles of Politics_ (translated by Hastie and published by Clark) contains his smaller works on Universal History, Perpetual Peace, and the Principle of Progress. See also the _Essay on Herder_.