shifting with the chance currents of the brain, and representing
nothing, so to speak, but personal temperature. Personal temperature,
moreover, is sometimes tropical. There are brains like a South American
jungle, as there are others like an Arabian desert, strewn with nothing
but bones. While a passionate sultriness prevails in the mind there is
no end to its luxuriance. Languages intricately articulate, flaming
mythologies, metaphysical perspectives lost in infinity, arise in
remarkable profusion. In time, however, there comes a change of climate
and the whole forest disappears.

It is easy, from the stand-point of acquired practical competence, to
deride a merely imaginative life. Derision, however, is not
interpretation, and the better method of overcoming erratic ideas is to
trace them out dialectically and see if they will not recognise their
own fatuity. The most irresponsible vision has certain principles of
order and valuation by which it estimates itself; and in these
principles the Life of Reason is already broached, however halting may
be its development. We should lead ourselves out of our dream, as the
Israelites were led out of Egypt, by the promise and eloquence of that
dream itself. Otherwise we might kill the goose that lays the golden
egg, and by proscribing imagination abolish science.

[Sidenote: Intrinsic pleasure in existence.]

[Sidenote: Pleasure a good,]

Visionary experience has a first value in its possible pleasantness. Why
any form of feeling should be delightful is not to be explained
transcendentally: a physiological law may, after the fact, render every
instance predictable; but no logical affinity between the formal quality