will count for more in the
ideal type than its frequency would warrant. The generic image has
been constructed under the influence of a selective attention, bent
upon aesthetic worth.

To praise any object for approaching the ideal of its kind is
therefore only a roundabout way of specifying its intrinsic merit
and expressing its direct effect on our sensibility. If in referring to
the ideal we were not thus analyzing the real, the ideal would be an
irrelevant and unmeaning thing. We know what the ideal is
because we observe what pleases us in the reality. If we allow the
general notion to tyrannize at all over the particular impression and
to blind us to new and unclassified beauties which the latter may
contain, we are simply substituting words for feelings, and making
a verbal classification pass for an aesthetic judgment. Then the
sense of beauty is gone to seed. Ideals have their uses, but their
authority is wholly representative. They stand for specific
satisfactions, or else they stand for nothing at all.

In fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas
and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods,
are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for
experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and
surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder
hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and
direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to
bear our ignorance of fact.

The same thing happens, in a way, in other fields. Our armies
are devices necessitated by our weakness; our property an
encumbrance required by our need. If our situation were not
precarious, these great engines of death and life would not be
invented. And our intelligence is such another weapon against fate.
We need not lament the fact, since, after all, to build these various
structures is, up to a certain point, the natural function of human
nature. The trouble is not that the products are always subjective,
but that they are sometimes unfit and torment the spirit which they
exercise. The pathetic part of our situation appears only when we
so attach ourselves to those necessary but imperfect fictions, as to
reject the facts from which they spring and of which they seek to
be prophetic. We are then guilty of that substitution of means for
ends, which is called idolatry in religion, absurdity in logic, and
folly in morals. In aes