ther fashion. In justifying this
attachment forensically, with arguments on the low level of men's named
and consecrated interests, people have indeed said, and perhaps come to
believe, that their imaginative interests were material interests at
bottom, thinking thus to give them more weight and legitimacy; whereas
in truth material life itself would be nothing worth, were it not, in
its essence and its issue, ideal.

It was stupidly asserted, however, that if a man omitted the prescribed
ceremonies or had unauthorised dreams about the gods, he would lose his
battles in this world and go to hell in the other. He who runs can see
that these expectations are not founded on any evidence, on any
observation of what actually occurs; they are obviously a _mirage_
arising from a direct ideal passion, that tries to justify itself by
indirection and by falsehoods, as it has no need to do. We all read
facts in the way most congruous with our intellectual habit, and when
this habit drives us to effulgent creations, absorbing and expressing
the whole current of our being, it not merely biasses our reading of
this world but carries us into another world altogether, which we posit
instead of the real one, or beside it.

Grotesque as the blunder may seem by which we thus introduce our poetic
tropes into the sequence of external events or existences, the blunder
is intellectual only; morally, zeal for our special rhetoric may not be
irrational. The lovely Phoebus is no fact for astronomy, nor does he
stand behind the material sun, in some higher heaven, physically
superintending its movements; but Phoebus is a fact in his own region, a
token of man's joyful piety in the presence of the forces that really
condition his welfare. In the region of symbols, in the world of poetry,
Phoebus has his inalienable rights. Forms of poetry are forms of human
life. Languages express national character and enshrine particular ways
of seeing and valuing events. To make substitutions and extensions in
expression is to give the soul, in her inmost substance, a somewhat new
constitution. A method of apperception is a spontaneous variation in
mind, perhaps the origin of a new moral species.

The value apperceptive methods have is of course largely representative,
in that they serve more or less aptly to dominate the order of events
and to guide action; but quite apart from this practical value,
expressions possess a character of their own, a sort of veg