You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior.

You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring.

You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.
We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature, and as we follow here the first and natural speculation, we will leave out (for the present) the idea of getting it from God.

We must have our own vision.

But the attempts of most moderns to express it are highly vague.
Some fall back simply on the clock: they talk as if mere passage through time brought some superiority; so that even a man of the first mental calibre carelessly uses the phrase that human morality is never up to date.