n for the inherent evils in the experience described; in the
unjust judgments, finally, of mystical optimism, that sinks so
completely into its subjective commotion as to mistake the suspension of
all discriminating and representative faculties for a true union in
things, and the blur of its own ecstasy for a universal glory. These
pleasures are all on the sensuous plane, the plane of levity and
unintentional wickedness; but in their own sphere they have their own
value. AEsthetic and speculative emotions make an important contribution
to the total worth of existence, but they do not abolish the evils of
that experience on which they reflect with such ruthless satisfaction.
The satisfaction is due to a private flood of emotion submerging the
images present in fancy, or to the exercise of a new intellectual
function, like that of abstraction, synthesis, or comparison. Such a
faculty, when fully developed, is capable of yielding pleasures as
intense and voluminous as those proper to rudimentary animal functions,
wrongly supposed to be more vital. The acme of vitality lies in truth in
the most comprehensive and penetrating thought. The rhythms, the sweep,
the impetuosity of impassioned contemplation not only contain in
themselves a great vitality and potency, but they often succeed in
engaging the lower functions in a sympathetic vibration, and we see the
whole body and soul rapt, as we say, and borne along by the harmonies of
imagination and thought. In these fugitive moments of intoxication the
detail of truth is submerged and forgotten. The emotions which would be
suggested by the parts are replaced by the rapid emotion of transition
between them; and this exhilaration in survey, this mountain-top
experience, is supposed to be also the truest vision of reality.
Absorption in a supervening function is mistaken for comprehension of
all fact, and this inevitably, since all consciousness of particular
facts and of their values is then submerged in the torrent of cerebral
excitement.

[Sidenote: Imputed values: their inconstancy.]

That luminous blindness which in these cases takes an extreme form is
present in principle throughout all reflection. We tend to regard our
own past as good only when we still find some value in the memory of it.
Last year, last week, even the feelings of the last five minutes, are
not otherwise prized than by the pleasure we may still have in recalling
them; the pulsations of pleasure or pain wh