us into
the imagined presence of companions that really did not exist, or on
whose attitude and co-operation our successes in no way depended, we
should try to lead back our sense of fellowship to its natural
foundations and possible sanctions.

Society exists so far as does analogous existence and community of ends.
We may, in refining the social instinct, find some fellowship in the
clouds and in the stars, for these, though remote, are companions of our
career. By poetic analogy we may include in the social world whatever
helps or thwarts our development, and is auxiliary to the energies of
the soul, even if that object be inanimate. Whatever spirit in the past
or future, or in the remotest regions of the sky, shares our love and
pursuit, say of mathematics or of music, or of any ideal object,
becomes, if we can somehow divine his existence, a partner in our joys
and sorrows, and a welcome friend.

[Sidenote: The ideal a measure for all existences and no existence
itself.]

Those ideal objects, however, for whose sake all revolutions in space
and time may be followed with interest, are not themselves members of
our society. The ideal to which all forces should minister is itself no
force or factor in its own realisation. Such a possible disposition of
things is a mere idea, eternal and inert, a form life might possibly
take on and the one our endeavours, if they were consistent, would wish
to impose on it. This ideal itself, however, has often been expressed in
some mythical figure or Utopia. So to express it is simply to indulge an
innocent instinct for prophecy and metaphor; but unfortunately the very
innocence of fancy may engage it all the more hopelessly in a tangle of
bad dreams. If we once identify our Utopia or other ideal with the real
forces that surround us, or with any one of them, we have fallen into an
illusion from which we shall emerge only after bitter disappointments;
and even when we have come out again into the open, we shall long carry
with us the desolating sense of wasted opportunities and vitiated
characters. For to have taken our purposes for our helpers is to have
defeated the first and ignored the second; it is to have neglected
rational labour and at the same time debauched social sense.

The religious extensions of society should therefore be carefully
watched; for while sometimes, as with the Hebrew prophets, religion
gives dramatic expression to actual social forces and helps to int