great importance, common financial
interests. These bonds often suffice for substantial and lasting
unanimity, even when no ideal passion preceded; so that what is called a
marriage of reason, if it is truly reasonable, may give a fair promise
of happiness, since a normal married life can produce the sympathies it
requires.

[Sidenote: Between master and disciple.]

When the common ideal interests needed to give friendship a noble strain
become altogether predominant, so that comradeship and personal liking
may be dispensed with, friendship passes into more and more political
fellowships. Discipleship is a union of this kind. Without claiming any
share in the master's private life, perhaps without having ever seen
him, we may enjoy communion with his mind and feel his support and
guidance in following the ideal which links us together. Hero-worship is
an imaginative passion in which latent ideals assume picturesque shapes
and take actual persons for their symbols. Such companionship, perhaps
wholly imaginary, is a very clear and simple example of ideal society.
The unconscious hero, to be sure, happens to exist, but his existence is
irrelevant to his function, provided only he be present to the
idealising mind. There is or need be no comradeship, no actual force or
influence transmitted from him. Certain capacities and tendencies in the
worshipper are brought to a focus by the hero's image, who is thereby
first discovered and deputed to be a hero. He is an unmoved mover, like
Aristotle's God and like every ideal to which thought or action is
directed.

The symbol, however, is ambiguous in hero-worship, being in one sense
ideal, the representation of an inner demand, and in another sense a
sensible experience, the representative of an external reality.
Accordingly the symbol, when highly prized and long contemplated, may
easily become an idol; that in it which is not ideal nor representative
of the worshipper's demand may be imported confusedly into the total
adored, and may thus receive a senseless worship. The devotion which
was, in its origin, an ideal tendency grown conscious and expressed in
fancy may thus become a mechanical force vitiating that ideal. For this
reason it is very important that the first objects to fix the soul's
admiration should be really admirable, for otherwise their accidental
blemishes will corrupt the mind to which they appear _sub specie boni_.

[Sidenote: Conflict between ideal and nat