es, little thinking to touch the ground of their praise. For
things are called great because they are memorable, they are not
remembered because they were great. The deepest pangs, the highest joys,
the widest influences are lost to apperception in its haste, and if in
some rational moment reconstructed and acknowledged, are soon forgotten
again and cut off from living consideration. But the emptiest
experience, even the most pernicious tendency, if embodied in a
picturesque image, if reverberating in the mind with a pleasant echo, is
idolised and enshrined. Fortunate indeed was Achilles that Homer sang of
him, and fortunate the poets that make a public titillation out of their
sorrows and ignorance. This imputed and posthumous fortune is the only
happiness they have. The favours of memory are extended to those feeble
realities and denied to the massive substance of daily experience. When
life dies, when what was present becomes a memory, its ghost flits still
among the living, feared or worshipped not for the experience it once
possessed but for the aspect it now wears. Yet this injustice in
representation, speculatively so offensive, is practically excusable;
for it is in one sense right and useful that all things, whatever their
original or inherent dignity, should be valued at each moment only by
their present function and utility.

[Sidenote: Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy.]

[Sidenote: The test a controlled present ideal.]

The error involved in attributing value to the past is naturally
aggravated when values are to be assigned to the future. In the latter
case imagination cannot be controlled by circumstantial evidence, and is
consequently the only basis for judgment. But as the conception of a
thing naturally evokes an emotion different from that involved in its
presence, ideals of what is desirable for the future contain no warrant
that the experience desired would, when actual, prove to be acceptable
and good. An ideal carries no extrinsic assurance that its realisation
would be a benefit. To convince ourselves that an ideal has rational
authority and represents a better experience than the actual condition
it is contrasted with, we must control the prophetic image by as many
circumlocutions as possible. As in the case of fame, we must buttress or
modify our spontaneous judgment with all the other judgments that the
object envisaged can prompt: we must make our ideal harmonise with all
experience rath