Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/370

 judged, rests upon the spontaneous character of the organising cognition as a source, not upon what happen to be the contents to which, for brevity’s sake, we have thus far confined our attention in making out the fact of this spontaneous mental life, The truth is, our a priori cognition is not confined to these conditions of mere perception; it goes, on the contrary, and with still clearer evidence, to the region of our guiding ideals — to the True, to the Beautiful, to the Good. These all-controlling ideals are not only the goal of the sense-perceptive or experiencing spirit, but are actively constituent in the soul’s primary being. The same reasoning that leads us to conclude Time, Space, and Causation, the conditions of sense-perceptive life, to be structural in our active primal being, leads quite as unavoidably, and more directly, to the higher conclusion that the three ideals are also structural in it, and still more profoundly. By their very ideality they conclusively refer themselves to our spontaneous life: nothing ideal can be derived from experience, just as nothing experimental is ever ideal.

The worth-imparting ideals, then, are, by virtue of the active and indivisible unity of our person, in an elemental and inseparable union with the root-principles of our perceptive life. Proof of our indestructible sourcefulness for such percipient life is therefore ipso facto proof that these ideals will reign everlast-