[Log4c-devel] Eased from all service and suffere

[Curzi C. <adr...@m-...>]

Indispensable. We are now to seek the real not in the ideal itself,
but in that spiritual unity in which
appearance is the incentive to truth, and natural imperfection the
spring to goodness. This may be
translated into the
language which Plato uses in the "Symposium," when Diotima
is revealing to Socrates the meaning of love. The new reality will be
not the loved one, but love

itself. "What then is Love? Is he mortal?" "No." "What then?" "As in
the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but is a mean
between them."
"What is he then, Diotima?" "He is a great spirit, and like all that
is spiritual he is intermediate between the divine and
the mortal."[359:3] Reality is no longer the God who mingles not with
men, but that power which, as Diotima further says, "interprets
and conveys to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men
the commands and rewards of the gods." In speaking for such an
idealism,
Emerson says: "Everything good is on the highway. The middle region
of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and
cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that
of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of
thought, of spirit, of poetry. . . . The mid-world is best."[359:4]
The new reality is this highway of the spirit, the very course and
raceway of self-consciousness. It is
traversed in the movement and self-correction of thought, in the
interest in ideals, or in the submission of the will to the control
of the moral law. [Sidenote:

Fichteanism, or the Absolute Spirit as Moral Activity.] Sect. 177. It
is the last of these phases
of self-consciousness that Fichte, who was Kant's immediate
successor, regards as of paramount importance. As Platonism began
with the ideal of the good or

the object of life, so the new idealism begins with the conviction of
duty, or _the story of life_. Being is the living moral nature
compelled to build itself a natural order wherein it may obey the
moral law, and to divide itself into a community of moral selves
through whi