adopting ideas, or of unseemly heat in defending them just because we
have adopted them. But if the considerations which I propose to recall
are really incorporated into our thinking and are permitted to
establish our general outlook on human affairs, they will do much to
relieve the imaginary obligation we feel in regard to traditional
sentiments and ideals. Few of us are capable of engaging in creative
thought, but some of us can at least come to distinguish it from other
and inferior kinds of thought and accord to it the esteem that it
merits as the greatest treasure of the past and the only hope of the
future.


NOTES.

[2] The poet-clergyman, John Donne, who lived in the time of James I,
has given a beautifully honest picture of the doings of a saint's
mind: "I throw myself down in my chamber and call in and invite God
and His angels thither, and when they are there I neglect God and His
angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the
whining of a door. I talk on in the same posture of praying, eyes
lifted up, knees bowed down, as though I prayed to God, and if God or
His angels should ask me when I thought last of God in that prayer I
cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I had forgot what I was about, but
when I began to forget it I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's
pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a
noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a
fancy, a chimera in my brain troubles me in my prayer."--Quoted by
ROBERT LYND, _The Art of Letters_, pp. 46-47.

[3] Instincts of the Herd, p. 44.