ience has in representation appears again in one of the most
curious anomalies in human life--the exorbitant interest which thought
and reflection take in the form of experience and the slight account
they make of its intensity or volume. Sea-sickness and child-birth when
they are over, the pangs of despised love when that love is finally
forgotten or requited, the travail of sin when once salvation is
assured, all melt away and dissolve like a morning mist leaving a clear
sky without a vestige of sorrow. So also with merely remembered and not
reproducible pleasures; the buoyancy of youth, when absurdity is not yet
tedious, the rapture of sport or passion, the immense peace found in a
mystical surrender to the universal, all these generous ardours count
for nothing when they are once gone. The memory of them cannot cure a
fit of the blues nor raise an irritable mortal above some petty act of
malice or vengeance, or reconcile him to foul weather. An ode of Horace,
on the other hand, a scientific monograph, or a well-written page of
music is a better antidote to melancholy than thinking on all the
happiness which one's own life or that of the universe may ever have
contained. Why should overwhelming masses of suffering and joy affect
imagination so little while it responds sympathetically to aesthetic and
intellectual irritants of very slight intensity, objects that, it must
be confessed, are of almost no importance to the welfare of mankind? Why
should we be so easily awed by artistic genius and exalt men whose works
we know only by name, perhaps, and whose influence upon society has been
infinitesimal, like a Pindar or a Leonardo, while we regard great
merchants and inventors as ignoble creatures in comparison? Why should
we smile at the inscription in Westminster Abbey which calls the
inventor of the spinning-jenny one of the _true_ benefactors of mankind?
Is it not probable, on the whole, that he has had a greater and less
equivocal influence on human happiness than Shakespeare with all his
plays and sonnets? But the cheapness of cotton cloth produces no
particularly delightful image in the fancy to be compared with Hamlet or
Imogen. There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly
deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

[Sidenote: Irrational religious allegiance.]

The same aesthetic bias appears in the moral sphere. Utilitarians have
attempted to show that the human conscience commen