Our ideals of action must be self-made or self-begotten, but yet they must be congruent with known fact; but the manner of such congruence is hard to see, hard to express. Ideals cannot be themselves facts, and therefore cannot be known, but on the other hand they cannot be mere imaginations or suppositions or beliefs, still less, of course, illusions or delusions. They are not visionary, and the apprehension of them is a sort or degree of perception. They point beyond themselves to some higher fact which is not cognizable by our senses or perhaps our understanding, but which is yet genuinely cognizable and so in some high sense fact. Yet they are not, as we envisage them, the fact to which they point, but a substitute for or representative of that--an anticipation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'--a term I do not like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of a certain incumbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is that their reality--it seems a paradox that an ideal should possess 'reality'--consists in their suggestiveness of modes of action and their applicability to it, all this being supported by the conception of a state of affairs beyond and around us which makes it 'right'. If all this is so, Progress as an ideal of action cannot be precisely identical with Progress as a fact or object of actual or possible knowledge. We can never know what we are aiming at. But though different, the two are and must be congruent, and this may be enough to justify us in using the one name for the two. Unless there were Progress as fact everywhere and always in the universe--outside us--in Nature and History, and unless we took ourselves genuinely to apprehend this, we could not form the practical ideal of Progress, or at least the ideal could not be right. But the difference remains, and we must be prepared for and allow for it; though we can use the knowledge we obtain of the fact of Progress to control and guide our formulation of the practical ideal, we cannot identify the one with the other. Our imagining and our supposing of what is best for or obligatory upon us to do or work for, must go on under conditions--the conditions of what we know as to the nature of ourselves and our surroundings--and yet under these conditions has a very large liberty or autonomy.