ious temples; they may all
remain standing, and we may continue our cult in them without outward
change, long after the god has fled from the last into his native
heaven. We may try to convince ourselves that we have lost nothing when
we have lost all. We may take comfort in praising the mixed and
perfunctory attachments which cling to us by force of habit and duty,
repeating the empty names of creatures that have long ceased to be what
we once could love, and assuring ourselves that we have remained
constant, without admitting that the world, which is in irreparable
flux, has from the first been betraying us.

Ashamed of being so deeply deceived, we may try to smile cynically at
the glory that once shone upon us, and call it a dream. But cynicism is
wasted on the ideal. There is indeed no idol ever identified with the
ideal which honest experience, even without cynicism, will not some day
unmask and discredit. Every real object must cease to be what it seemed,
and none could ever be what the whole soul desired. Yet what the soul
desires is nothing arbitrary. Life is no objectless dream, but
continually embodies, with varying success, the potentialities it
contains and that prompt desire. Everything that satisfies at all, even
if partially and for an instant, justifies aspiration and rewards it.
Existence, however, cannot be arrested; and only the transmissible forms
of things can endure, to match the transmissible faculties which living
beings hand down to one another. The ideal is accordingly significant,
perpetual, and as constant as the nature it expresses; but it can never
itself exist, nor can its particular embodiments endure.

[Sidenote: Its universal scope.]

Love is accordingly only half an illusion; the lover, but not his love,
is deceived. His madness, as Plato taught, is divine; for though it be
folly to identify the idol with the god, faith in the god is inwardly
justified. That egregious idolatry may therefore be interpreted ideally
and given a symbolic scope worthy of its natural causes and of the
mystery it comes to celebrate. The lover knows much more about absolute
good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the
latter, too, be lovers in disguise. Logical universals are terms in
discourse, without vital ideality, while traditional gods are at best
natural existences, more or less indifferent facts. What the lover comes
upon, on the contrary, is truly persuasive, and witnesses t