defeated illusions. It is indeed well for us that we have such defeated illusions to contrast with the prosaic reality of life’s ordinary self-consciousness; for from the ashes of dead selves the very life of the spirit may spring, and, being such as we are, we never win ideals except through first lamenting dear and lost realities. But the ideal self, in the proper sense, comes into sight only in so far as we can learn from life that whatever we are, or plan or carry out, in the world that we see or touch, it is none of it an expression of ourselves as we ought to be; since the moral task of life is simply not to be accomplished by any one visible deed, by the success of any undertaking, by the fulfilling of any mortal office. That man is imperfect; that the moral law is too high for him now completely to accomplish the tasks that it sets him; that man, as he is, is weak, prone to error, doomed to failure even in the midst of his best successes, — these are observations that popular wisdom has for ages repeated. They can be interpreted despairingly. But wise men interpret them strenuously, and get from them a definition of self-consciousness which may be called the distinctively Ethical definition.
For this definition we are now prepared. My lost ideals, my buried illusions, illustrate to me my own nature, as this ego, in so far as they set off the chaos of my chance empirical selfhood against the conceived perfection of an ideal life that, as I vainly feel, might have been, but is not. I often am disposed to say: “That lost ideal self is my true self. For it has unity, connexion, orderliness, about it.
