The intensification phase has applied the permanent measure to the ordinary domains of life. What follows is a deeper consideration of the situation in which that application must occur. The traditional world is gone. Its forms, its authorities, its supporting environment no longer exist as living realities for the man of this age. The residual possibilities are those that can still be realized by the differentiated individual acting from an interior center that does not require external confirmation.
The age presents two false alternatives: the attempt to restore what cannot be restored, and the full acceptance of dissolution as the only remaining path. The higher type rejects both. He does not waste force on the reconstruction of forms that the cycle has already exhausted. He does not surrender the possibility of a vertical orientation simply because the collective supports for that orientation have disappeared. The residual possibility is the maintenance of the type itself under conditions that no longer favor it.
Young men who sense the collapse often oscillate between these two poles. One day they seek a lost order that cannot return in its previous shape. The next day they conclude that nothing remains and therefore nothing is required of them. The differentiated individual holds a third position. He accepts the irreversible character of the present phase of the cycle. He continues to form himself according to the permanent measure. That formation is the residual possibility that still belongs to the man who is capable of it.
The work from this point is the clarification of what can still be done and the refusal of what cannot. The applications already established remain in force. They are now understood as the concrete expression of a possibility that survives the end of the traditional world. The man who continues them is already living the residual possibility. He does not need to wait for a change in the external order.