rmation in our imagination and their translation into fact. Slack
muscle should go with the daydream or picture of the future; we should
not strike or clench or lift until we have decided that the action is
right and just and wise. The girl who counted her chickens and broke
the eggs is a true enough example: every doctor and coroner knows many
instances of results far more tragic.

But sometimes the vision has nothing in it but what is pure and good
and noble. Are there any dangers even here?

There is this danger always, that we find the picture so lovely and so
satisfying that we cannot summon up courage and energy to turn away
from it towards the serious work which it suggests. The castle in the
air is radiant and tall, but it is generally meant as a model for a
tougher building made out of common earth, by toil and pain, amidst
mud and dust. It is so much easier, as Sordello knew, to imagine than
to do. Actual circumstances, real life, other people all this that
lies round us is sterner stuff than our easily moulded material of
dreams. Who has not at some time or other lain sleepily in bed of a
morning and gone through in thought the processes of getting up, until
a louder call or an alarum bell has awakened the realisation that the
task is not yet begun? Who has not been tempted to shirk practice of
some sort in thinking of a prize? Who has not sometimes built
expectation higher and higher until his demands of fate have become so
great that, in despair of making good, he has let the whole plan slip
away into the valley of forgotten dreams?

These dangers, the almost involuntary carrying out of unworthy aims
that have been cherished in thought and the loss of vigour for real
achievement, due to too easy an indulgence in blameless aspiration,
are fairly obvious and have long been recognised.

There is another that has been seen from time to time and occasionally
expressed.[16] We have seen that too loose a dream-world may make the
world in which we live seem dull and ordinary. But is not the converse
at least as often true? If our thought-world is too narrow, too
selfish or too weak, all our ordinary work, sound and compact though
it may be, is stultified, misdirected, often wasted. We all know how
in the industrial world something more than industry is needed; in the
emotional world something more than a clumsy and unapprehending
goodwill. We need a certain insight to turn these solid qualities of
labour and fe