To Give Up Pretensions Is As Blessed

Experience, As We Know, Has A Way Of Boiling Over, And Making Us Correct Our Present Formulas.

Who Does Not See That We Are Likely To Ascertain The Distinctive Significance Of Religious Melancholy And Happiness, Or Of Religious Trances, Far Better By Comparing Them As Conscientiously As We Can With Other Varieties Of Melancholy, Happiness, And Trance, Than By Refusing To Consider Their Place In Any More General Series, And Treating Them As If They Were Outside Of Nature's Order Altogether?

The Lunatic's Visions Of Horror Are All Drawn From The Material Of Daily Fact.

Or If The Hypothesis Were Offered Us Of A World In Which Messrs. Fourier's And Bellamy's And Morris's Utopias Should All Be Outdone, And Millions Kept Permanently Happy On The One Simple Condition That A Certain Lost Soul On The Far-off Edge Of Things Should Lead A Life Of Lonely Torment, What Except A Specifical And Independent Sort Of Emotion Can It Be Which Would Make Us Immediately Feel, Even Though An Impulse Arose Within Us To Clutch At The Happiness So Offered, How Hideous A Thing Would Be Its Enjoyment When Deliberately Accepted As The Fruit Of Such A Bargain?

Truth Lives, In Fact, For The Most Part On A Credit System. Our Thoughts And Beliefs Pass, So Long As Nothing Challenges Them, Just As Bank-notes Pass So Long As Nobody Refuses Them.