son. Yet, considering the animal basis of human life, an
attachment resting on that circumstance is a necessary and rational
attachment.

This physical bond should not, indeed, disturb the intellect in its
proper function or warp its judgments; you should not, under guise of
tenderness, become foolish and attribute to your father or child greater
stature or cleverness or goodness than he actually possesses. To do so
is a natural foible but no part of piety or true loyalty. It is one
thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just
imagination. Indeed, piety is never so beautiful and touching, never so
thoroughly humane and invincible, as when it is joined to an impartial
intellect, conscious of the relativity involved in existence and able to
elude, through imaginative sympathy, the limits set to personal life by
circumstance and private duty. As a man dies nobly when, awaiting his
own extinction, he is interested to the last in what will continue to be
the interests and joys of others, so he is most profoundly pious who
loves unreservedly a country, friends, and associations which he knows
very well to be not the most beautiful on earth, and who, being wholly
content in his personal capacity with his natural conditions, does not
need to begrudge other things whatever speculative admiration they may
truly deserve. The ideal in this polyglot world, where reason can
receive only local and temporal expression, is to understand all
languages and to speak but one, so as to unite, in a manly fashion,
comprehension with propriety.

Piety is in a sense pathetic because it involves subordination to
physical accident and acceptance of finitude. But it is also noble and
eminently fruitful because, in subsuming a life under the general laws
of relativity, it meets fate with simple sincerity and labours in
accordance with the conditions imposed. Since man, though capable of
abstraction and impartiality, is rooted like a vegetable to one point
in space and time, and exists by limitation, piety belongs to the
equilibrium of his being. It resides, so to speak, at his centre of
gravity, at the heart and magnetic focus of his complex endowment. It
exercises there the eminently sane function of calling thought home. It
saves speculative and emotional life from hurtful extravagance by
keeping it traditional and social. Conventional absurdities have at
least this advantage, that they may be taken conventionally and may come
to