ded. The stars are in human thought a symbol for the
silent forces of destiny, really embodied in forms beyond our
apprehension; for who shall say what actual being may or may not
correspond to that potentiality of life or sensation which is all that
the external world can be to our science? When astrology invented the
horoscope it made an absurdly premature translation of celestial
hieroglyphics into that language of universal destiny which in the end
they may be made to speak. The perfect astronomer, when he understood at
last exactly what pragmatic value the universe has, and what fortunes
the stars actually forebode, would be pleasantly surprised to discover
that he was nothing but an astrologer grown competent and honest.

[Sidenote: Representative notions have also inherent values.]

Ideal society belongs entirely to this realm of kindly illusion, for it
is the society of symbols. Whenever religion, art, or science presents
us with an image or a formula, involving no matter how momentous a
truth, there is something delusive in the representation. It needs
translation into the detailed experience which it sums up in our own
past or prophecies elsewhere. This eventual change in form, far from
nullifying our knowledge, can alone legitimise it. A conception not
reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not
exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a
fraud. And yet there is another aspect to the matter. Symbols are
presences, and they are those particularly congenial presences which we
have inwardly evoked and cast in a form intelligible and familiar to
human thinking. Their function is to give flat experience a rational
perspective, translating the general flux into stable objects and making
it representable in human discourse. They are therefore precious, not
only for their representative or practical value, implying useful
adjustments to the environing world, but even more, sometimes, for their
immediate or aesthetic power, for their kinship to the spirit they
enlighten and exercise.

This is prevailingly true in the fine arts which seem to express man
even more than they express nature; although in art also the symbol
would lose all its significance and much of its inward articulation if
natural objects and eventual experience could be disregarded in
constructing it. In music, indeed, this ulterior significance is reduced
to a minimum; yet it persists, since musi