than this one of the connection of feeling and movement." Still, before a theory can be true or false, it must be sufficiently clear, distinct, and consistent to be intelligible; and it may be questioned whether any other account of the active side of our consciousness—any other than that which regards activity as always first prompted by feeling, and sustained in response to movements of feeling—is intelligible. The whole trend of modern Psychology is distinctly towards such a conclusion; and if it is true 'for Psychology,' it is true for the reality of Life.
(c) The primary sentiments thus constitute a threefold striving or ἔρως in our nature: a striving after what, from the individual view-point, is not yet realized but may be so,—after what is potentially ours. From the universal view-point, these Feelings, as they tend to become supreme, constitute a self-surrender, as it were, to that which is eternally real, to that of which it may be said, as of Aristotle's unmoved Mover, κινεῖ ὡς ἐρώμενον. The apparent inconsistency between the two statements will be further discussed immediately.
Idealism is here in conflict with a dominant tendency of the present time, which is, to dwell on such ideals almost to the verge of sentimentality, and yet deny to them any ontological significance. Nevertheless, "amid all the sickly talk about 'ideals' which has become the commonplace of our age, it is well to remember that so long as they are a mere self-painting of the yearning spirit, and not its personal surrender to immediate communion with Infinite Perfection, they have no more solidity or steadiness than the floating air-bubbles glittering in the sunshine and broken by the passing wind. You do not so much as touch the threshold of religion [Idealism] so long as you are detained by the phantoms of your thought; the very gate of entrance to it, the moment of new birth, is the discovery that your gleaming ideal is the everlasting Real; no transient brush of a fancied angel's wing, but the abiding presence and persuasion of the Soul of souls." (James Martineau.)
Thus the essence of the Idealist view is, that what for us, as individuals, is not yet realized but may be so, is for the Abso-
