It is because of our need to recall vanished persons, that all goodness and justice, all right of any large sort, depend upon an active imagination. Without it we are the prisoners of the immediate environment and of the suggestions of the lower organism. It is only this that enables us to live with the best our lives have afforded, and maintain higher suggestions to compete with the baser ones that assail us. Let us hear Professor James again: “When for motives of honor and conscience I brave the condemnation of my own family, club and ‘set’; when as a Protestant I turn Catholic; as a Catholic, free-thinker; as a ‘regular practitioner,’ homeopath, or what not, I am always inwardly strengthened in my course, and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and better _possible_ social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now. The ideal social self which I thus seek in appealing to their decision may be very remote; it may be represented as barely possible. I may not hope for its realization during my lifetime; I may even expect the future generations, which would approve me if they knew me, to know nothing about me when I am dead and gone.”[100] As regards the nearness or remoteness of the companion it would perhaps be sufficient to say that if imagined he is actually present, so far as our mental and moral life are concerned, and except as affecting the vividness of our idea of him, it makes no immediate difference whether we ever saw him or whether he ever had any corporeal existence at all. The alteration of conscience due to the advent in thought of a new person is often so marked that one view of duty is quite evidently supplanted by a fresh one, due to the fresh suggestion. Thus, to take an example probably familiar to all who are used to mental application, it sometimes happens that a student is fagged and yet feels that he must think out his problem; there is a strong sense of oughtness backing this view, which, so long as it is unopposed, holds its ground as the call of duty. But now a friend may come in and suggest to him that he ought to stop, that if he goes on he will harm himself and do poor work. Here is another view of right, and the mind must now make a fresh synthesis and come, perhaps, to feel that its duty is to leave off. Because of its dependence upon personal suggestion, the right always reflects a social group; there is always a circle of persons, more or less extended, whom we really imagine, and who thus work upon our impulses and our conscience; while people outside of this have not a truly personal existence for us. The extent of this circle depends upon many circumstances, as for instance upon the vigor of our imaginations, and the reach of the means of communication through which personal symbols are impressed upon them.