"The lack of common sense does not allow them to understand the folly of
their enterprise, and rather than seek the causes of their habitual
failures, they prefer to attack God and man, both of whom they hold
responsible for all their unhappiness.
"They are willingly ironical, easily become pessimists, and villify life,
without desiring to perceive that it reserved as many smiles for them as
the happy people whom they envy.
"All these causes of disappointment can only be attributed to the lack of
equilibrium of the reasoning power and, above all, to the absence of
common sense, hence we cannot judge of relative values.
"To give a definite course to the plans which we form is to prepare the
happy termination of them.
"This is also the way to banish seductive illusion, the devourer of
beautiful ambitions and youthful aspirations."
And, with his habitual sense of the practical in life, Yoritomo adds the
following:
"There are, however, some imaginations which can not be controlled by the
power of reasoning, and which, in spite of everything, escape toward the
unlimited horizons of the dream.
"It would be in vain to think of shutting them up in the narrow prison
walls of strict reason; they would die wishing to attempt an escape.
"To these we can prescribe the dream under its most august form, that
of science.
"Each inventor has pursued an illusion, but those whose names have lived
to reach our recognition, have caught a glimpse of the vertiginous course
they were following, and no longer have allowed themselves to get too far
away from their base--science.
"Yes, illusion can be beautiful, on condition that it is not constantly
debilitated.
"To make it beautiful we must be its master, then we may attempt
its conquest.
"It is thus that all great men act; before adopting an illusion, as
truth, they have assured themselves of the means by the aid of which they
were permitted first to hope for its transformation and afterward be
certain of their power to discipline it.
"Illusion then changes its name and becomes the Ideal.
"Instead of remaining an inaccessible myth, it is transformed into an
entity for the creation of good.
"It is no longer the effort to conquer the impossible, which endeavor
saps our vital forces; it is a contingency which study and common sense
strip of all aleatory principles, in order to give a form which becomes
more tangible and more definite every day.
"We have nothing more to do with sterile efforts toward gaining an object
which fades from view and disappears as one approaches it.
"It is no longer the painful reaching out after an object always growing
more indistinct as we draw near it.
"It is through conscious and unremitting effort that we attain the
happy expression of successful endeavor and realize the best in life,
for slow ascension in winning this best leaves no room for satiety in
this noble strife.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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