DREAMS AND REALITIES. 



539 



Pure emotion knows of no limits. The more 

 vividly we feel, the less we attend to the condi- 

 tions of feeling. Absorbed in love or hate, we 

 cannot for the moment even conceive the possi- 

 bility of satiety, and imagine raptures indefinitely 

 protracted. Past feelings survive, and the future 

 is anticipated, and we imagine a state independent 

 of time, and in which destruction has no place. 

 We are irritated by the unsubstantially of the 

 • images created, and we try to compensate their 

 faintness by magnifying them to gigantic and more 

 than gigantic proportions. The phantasms die 

 away rapidly as we wake, and we stimulate our 

 jaded and flagging imaginations by drawing in- 

 definitely upon the boundless resources of dream- 

 land. 



A world thus framed may at times represent 

 the strength of love. We cannot and we will 

 not believe in the loss of those whose lives seemed 

 to be part of our essence. A belief caused by 

 (I cannot say based upon) this passionate yearn- 

 ing is so pathetic, and even sacred, that the 

 unbeliever may well shrink from breathing his 

 doubts in its presence. But, again, it may mean 

 the intense dislike of a selfish nature to part from 

 all chance of enjoyment. It is mere greediness 

 for life, and means so strong a regard for one's 

 own wretched little individuality, that the uni- 

 verse seems worthless unless it is preserved. Or 

 it may be the expression of the intense longing 

 for rest of the weary and heavy-laden, to whom 

 life is an incessant struggle against overpowering 

 forces, who have come to regard all desires as 

 torments, and whose ideal is an everlasting re- 

 pose scarcely distinguishable from annihilation. 

 The more active intellect frames a different ideal : 

 it feels that the physical needs, and the sensual 

 desires which bind us to satisfy them, are the 

 conditions that clog its energies, and longs for a 

 region where the pure intellect and the finer 

 essence of love may have room for action in per- 

 fect independence of those degrading incum- 

 brances. The moralist longs for a state in which 

 good and evil shall be finally and unalterably 

 divided, and the harrowing sense of unequal dis- 

 tribution of happiness and misery cease its tor- 

 menting discords. The philosopher longs for a 

 final revelation of truth, and the bigot for a 

 world in which heretics will be tormented. The 

 nihilist and the ascetic and the sensualist, the 

 lofty and the common-sense moralist, the selfish 

 and the benevolent man, the mystic and the 

 hard logician, will each create a heaven or a hell 

 of his own ; and the future world, created by a 

 creed which represents a wide and carefully-elab- 



orated system of speculation, will blend more 

 or less consistently many different conceptions. 

 Only it is as well to remark that when people be- 

 gin to quarrel about their dreams, the whole fab- 

 ric is apt to show its baselessness ; and further, 

 that opponents should remember that one of the 

 conditions of dream-land is that it should admit 

 the phantoms of terror as well as of ecstasy. 

 Wake, and the phantom will disappear; but if 

 you choose to dream, you must have your night- 

 mares as well as your visions of undying bliss. 

 Dreams must be at least distorted and grotesque 

 shadows of realities. Since life is at best a hard 

 struggle, you can only create a heaven at the 

 price of supposing a counterbalancing hell. That 

 is a law of the imagination which will fulfill it- 

 self in spite of the best-meant efforts. Heaven 

 and hell are corollaries, and rise and fall to- 

 gether. Hell, so far as it is real, is the hell 

 within us. Shame, remorse, unavailing regret 

 for the past, are the very materials out of which 

 it is constructed. It is precisely the shadow of 

 the mental anguish cast upon the misty world of 

 dreams. To produce " conviction of sin " is the 

 aim of all Christian preaching ; the more intense 

 the conviction, the more vivid the phantoms gen- 

 erated in the mind. The triumph of good may 

 be logically interpreted to mean the extinction of 

 evil. But in the logic of the imagination, since 

 our satisfaction in the good is bound up with, if 

 it docs not rather spring out of, our misery under 

 evil, the triumphant good is inconceivable with- 

 out the prostrate evil. The background of dark- 

 ness is necessary to make the glory visible. Our 

 hopes arc but the obverse of our fears. What- 

 ever the meaning of al&vios, the fearful emotion 

 which is symbolized is eternal or independent of 

 time by the same right as the ecstatic emotion. 

 It is as impossible to separate light from dark- 

 ness, height from depth, object from subject, 

 as to conceive of good without conceiving evil. 

 And, indeed, the logic of the creed really falls in 

 with its symbolism. Time can have nothing to 

 do with arguments about the absolute and the 

 infinite ; and, if a sense of the real existence of 

 evil is at the root of our religious beliefs, its ex- 

 istence at all implies its existence in eternity. 

 You may escape verbally by denying that evil has 

 any real existence, but that is to adopt an opti- 

 mism, impossible as a genuine creed, and pro- 

 foundly alien to the Christian sentiment. You 

 may escape from Maniclweism, terribly plausible as 

 it is, by representing evil as limited and prostrate, 

 but you cannot destroy evil without destroying 

 its antithesis. To cultivate a strong sense of the 



