ntific diagram may be a
hypothesis; it may be a fancy; it may be a forgery. But it is always an
idol in the true sense of an image; and an image in the true sense of a
thing mastering the imagination and not the reason. The power of these
talismanic pictures is almost hypnotic to modern humanity. We can never
forget that we have seen a portrait of the Missing Link; though we
should instantly detect the lapse of logic into superstition, if we were
told that the old Greek agnostics had made a statue of the Unknown God.
But there is a still stranger fashion in which we fall victims to the
same trick of fancy. We accept in a blind and literal spirit, not only
images of speculation, but even figures of speech. The nineteenth
century prided itself on having lost its faith in myths, and proceeded
to put all its faith in metaphors. It dismissed the old doctrines about
the way of life and the light of the world; and then it proceeded to
talk as if the light of truth were really and literally a light, that
could be absorbed by merely opening our eyes; or as if the path of
progress were really and truly a path, to be found by merely following
our noses. Thus the purpose of God is an idea, true or false; but the
purpose of Nature is merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no God
there is no purpose. Yet while men, by an imaginative instinct, spoke of
the purpose of God with a grand agnosticism, as something too large to
be seen, something reaching out to worlds and to eternities, they speak
of the purpose of Nature in particular and practical problems of curing
babies or cutting up rabbits. This power of the modern metaphor must be
understood, by way of an introduction, if we are to understand one of
the chief errors, at once evasive and pervasive, which perplex the
problem of America.

America is always spoken of as a young nation; and whether or no this be
a valuable and suggestive metaphor, very few people notice that it is a
metaphor at all. If somebody said that a certain deserving charity had
just gone into trousers, we should recognise that it was a figure of
speech, and perhaps a rather surprising figure of speech. If somebody
said that a daily paper had recently put its hair up, we should know it
could only be a metaphor, and possibly a rather strained metaphor. Yet
these phrases would mean the only thing that can possibly be meant by
calling a corporate association of all sorts of people 'young'; that is,
that a cert