s.

A sense for alien thought is accordingly at its inception a complete
illusion. The thought is one's own, it is associated with an image
moving in space, and is uncritically supposed to be a hidden part of
that image, a metaphysical signification attached to its motion and
actually existing behind the scenes in the form of an unheard soliloquy.
A complete illusion this sense remains in mythology, in animism, in the
poetic forms of love and religion. A better mastery of experience will
in such cases dispel those hasty conceits by showing the fundamental
divergence which at once manifests itself between the course of
phenomena and the feelings associated with them. It will appear beyond
question that those feelings were private fancies merged with
observation in an undigested experience. They indicated nothing in the
object but its power of arousing emotional and playful reverberations in
the mind. Criticism will tend to clear the world of such poetic
distortion; and what vestiges of it may linger will be avowed fables,
metaphors employed merely in conventional expression. In the end even
poetic power will forsake a discredited falsehood: the poet himself will
soon prefer to describe nature in natural terms and to represent human
emotions in their pathetic humility, not extended beyond their actual
sphere nor fantastically uprooted from their necessary soil and
occasions. He will sing the power of nature over the soul, the joys of
the soul in the bosom of nature, the beauty visible in things, and the
steady march of natural processes, so rich in momentous incidents and
collocations. The precision of such a picture will accentuate its
majesty, as precision does in the poems of Lucretius and Dante, while
its pathos and dramatic interest will be redoubled by its truth.

[Sidenote: Case where it is not a fallacy.]

A primary habit producing widespread illusions may in certain cases
become the source of rational knowledge. This possibility will surprise
no one who has studied nature and life to any purpose. Nature and life
are tentative in all their processes, so that there is nothing
exceptional in the fact that, since in crude experience image and
emotion are inevitably regarded as constituting a single event, this
habit should usually lead to childish absurdities, but also, under
special circumstances, to rational insight and morality. There is
evidently one case in which the pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, the
ca