fidelity and to
merit. There is a high worth in rightly constituted natures independent
of incidental consciousness. It consists in that ingrained virtue which
under given circumstances would insure the noblest action and with that
action, of course, the noblest sentiments and ideas; ideas which would
arise spontaneously and would make more account of their objects than of
themselves.

[Sidenote: Metaphorical mind.]

The expression of habit in psychic metaphors is a procedure known also
to theology. Whenever natural or moral law is declared to reveal the
divine mind, this mind is a set of formal or ethical principles rather
than an imagined consciousness, re-enacted dramatically. What is
conceived is the god's operation, not his emotions. In this way God's
goodness becomes a symbol for the advantages of life, his wrath a symbol
for its dangers, his commandments a symbol for its laws. The deity
spoken of by the Stoics had exclusively this symbolic character; it
could be called a city--dear City of Zeus--as readily as an
intelligence. And that intelligence which ancient and ingenuous
philosophers said they saw in the world was always intelligence in this
algebraic sense, it was intelligible order. Nor did the Hebrew prophets,
in their emphatic political philosophy, seem to mean much more by
Jehovah than a moral order, a principle giving vice and virtue their
appropriate fruits.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

True society, then, is limited to similar beings living similar lives
and enabled by the contagion of their common habits and arts to
attribute to one another, each out of his own experience, what the other
actually endures. A fresh thought may be communicated to one who has
never had it before, but only when the speaker so dominates the
auditor's mind by the instrumentalities he brings to bear upon it that
he compels that mind to reproduce his experience. Analogy between
actions and bodies is accordingly the only test of valid inference
regarding the existence or character of conceived minds; but this
eventual test is far from being the source of such a conception. Its
source is not inference at all but direct emotion and the pathetic
fallacy. In the beginning, as in the end, what is attributed to others
is something directly felt, a dream dreamed through and dramatically
enacted, but uncritically attributed to the object by whose motions it
is suggested and controlled. In a single case, however, tertiary
qualities hap