common consent of mankind has decided that you have now attained
the right view. I ask, is it certain that in all cases the second
thought is the best;--is the right thought, as well as the calmest
thought? Would it be just to say (which would be the material
analogy) that you have the best view of some great rocky island when
you have sailed away from it till it has turned to a blue cloud on
the horizon; rather than when its granite and heather are full in
view, close at hand? I am not sure that in every case the calmer
thought is the right thought, the distant view the right view. You
have come to think indifferently of the personal injury, of the
act of foul cruelty and falsehood, which once roused you to flaming
indignation. Are you thinking rightly too? Or has not just such
an illusion been practised upon your mental view, as is played upon
your bodily eye when looking over ten miles of sea upon Staffa?
You do not see the basaltic columns now; but that is because you
see wrongly. You do not burn at the remembrance of the wicked lie,
the crafty misrepresentation, the cruel blow; but perhaps you ought
to do so. And now (to speak of less grave matters) when all I had
to say about Growing Old seems very poor, do I see it rightly? Do
I see it as my reader would always have seen it? Or has it faded
into falsehood, as well as into distance and dimness? When I look
back, and see my thoughts as trash, is it because they are trash
and no better? When I look back, and see Ailsa as a cloud, is it
because it is a cloud and nothing more? Or is it, as I have already
suggested, that in one respect the analogy between the moral and
the material fails.

I am going to write Concerning Disappointment and Success. In the
days when I studied metaphysics, I should have objected to that
title, inasmuch as the antithesis is imperfect between the two