The higher criterion under residual conditions is the residual capacity to judge according to the permanent measure after every collective criterion of superior order has been dissolved. The residual man continues to judge from that criterion even though the age offers no confirming standard. The criterion itself remains intact. Only the collective standards that once made its force public have disappeared.
Young men who still feel the pressure of a higher judgment often look for residual authorities or residual laws that will keep the criterion alive around them. Most of those authorities have already been emptied by the horizontal forces that dominate the age. The residual path does not wait for external standards. It continues as the permanent criterion from the interior center that still recognizes its force.
This solitary criterion is the residual form of the older traditional knowledge of right judgment. The man who continues to apply it already performs the residual act. That act does not require collective standards to remain real.
Judge by the criterion. Do not wait for the age to restore conditions in which the higher standard is collectively enforced. The residual act is to keep the permanent measure decisive in every concrete judgment. That decisiveness is the continuity of the higher type under residual conditions.