The permanent criterion alone is the residual capacity to judge and decide from the higher measure after every collective standard of higher order has been dissolved. The residual man continues to apply that criterion even though the age offers no confirming scale. 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 standard often look for residual authorities or residual doctrines 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 scale. It continues as the permanent judgment from the interior center that still holds the vertical measure.
This solitary criterion is the residual form of the older traditional knowledge of right measure. The man who continues to apply it already performs the residual act. That act does not require collective standards to remain real.
Apply the criterion. Do not wait for the age to restore conditions in which the higher standard is collectively recognized. 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.