Page:Reason in Common Sense (1920).djvu/144

 function is defined will essentially determine a perfect world of responsive extensions and conditions. These ideals will be a spiritual reality; and they will be expressed in nature in so far as nature supports that regulative interest. Many a perfect and eternal realm, merely potential in existence but definite in constitution, will thus subtend nature and be what a rational philosophy might call the ideal. What is called spirit would be the ideal in so far as it obtained expression in nature; and the power attributed to spirit would be the part of nature’s fertility by which such expression was secured.