inherent in representation]

Here we come upon one of those initial irrationalities in the world
theories of all sorts, since they are attempts to find rationality in
things, are in serious danger of overlooking. In estimating the value of
any experience, our endeavour, our pretension, is to weigh the value
which that experience possesses when it is actual. But to weigh is to
compare, and to compare is to represent, since the transcendental
isolation and self-sufficiency of actual experience precludes its lying
side by side with another datum, like two objects given in a single
consciousness. Successive values, to be compared, must be represented;
but the conditions of representation are such that they rob objects of
the values they had at their first appearance to substitute the values
they possess at their recurrence. For representation mirrors
consciousness only by mirroring its objects, and the emotional reaction
upon those objects cannot be represented directly, but is approached by
indirect methods, through an imitation or assimilation of will to will
and emotion to emotion. Only by the instrumentality of signs, like
gesture or language, can we bring ourselves to reproduce in some measure
an absent experience and to feel some premonition of its absolute value.
Apart from very elaborate and cumulative suggestions to the contrary, we
should always attribute to an event in every other experience the value
which its image now had in our own. But in that case the pathetic
fallacy would be present; for a volitional reaction upon an idea in one
vital context is no index to what the volitional reaction would be in
another vital context upon the situation which that idea represents.

[Sidenote: AEsthetic and speculative cruelty.]

This divergence falsifies all representation of life and renders it
initially cruel, sentimental, and mythical. We dislike to trample on a
flower, because its form makes a kind of blossoming in our own fancy
which we call beauty; but we laugh at pangs we endured in childhood and
feel no tremor at the incalculable sufferings of all mankind beyond our
horizon, because no imitable image is involved to start a contrite
thrill in our own bosom. The same cruelty appears in aesthetic pleasures,
in lust, war, and ambition; in the illusions of desire and memory; in
the unsympathetic quality of theory everywhere, which regards the
uniformities of cause and effect and the beauties of law as a
justificatio