________________
for realising the Ideal.
guided by its meaning as a whole. His life The method is not a life of surging passions and prompt
ings; on the contrary, he is the critic as well as the subject of these and as such he is the niaker of his own destiny. Man has to rise, in order to attain to this state of beatitude and bliss, above the impulses of the moment, and must view everything he feels or thinks or wills, in the light of the Supreme Idealthe source of all moral obligation. He must criticise the solicitations of sense and his natural tendency to activity, judge, approve or condemn them according as they stand either conducive or detrimental to the attainment of freedom or to the interest of his self-realisation. Living as he does in this stage of bondage-a state of perpetual conflict between reason and sensibility, between ideal and actual, between natural and moral, he cannot avoid this rule of life. He cannot without ceasing to be a moral personality abjure this function of self-legislation, which is the true way for self-realisation, because he feels an incessant craving in him for a life which would be the fulfilment of his true and characteristic nature.
470
