Profligacy and “fact-grinding” destroy the imagination by habitually dwelling in ultimate expressions while denying or forgetting the primary realities of which they are properly only the vessels. Purity ends by finding a goddess where impurity concludes by confessing carrion. Which of these is the reality let each man judge according to his taste. “Fact-grinding”--which Darwin confessed and lamented had destroyed his imagination and caused him to “nauseate Shakespeare”--commonly ends in destroying the religious faculty, as profligacy destroys the faculty of love; for neither love nor religion can survive without imagination, which Shelley, in one of his prefaces, identifying genius with imagination, declares to be the power of discerning spiritual facts. Those who have no imagination regard it as all one with “fancy,” which is only a playful mockery of imagination, bringing together things in which there is nothing but an accidental similarity in externals. VIII PATHOS Neither Aristotle nor Hegel, the two great expositors of the relation of the emotions to art, has discussed the nature of that which is understood by moderns as “pathos.” Aristotle has described in his _Rhetoric_, with the greatest acuteness and sensibility, the conditions and modes of exciting pity. But pity includes much that is excluded by pathos; and it may be useful to endeavour to ascertain what the limitations of the latter are, and what are its conditions in relation more particularly to art, in which it plays so important a part. Pity, then, differs from pathos in this: the latter is simply emotional, and reaches no higher than the sensitive nature; though the sensitive nature, being dependent for its power and delicacy very much upon the cultivation of will and intellect, may be indefinitely developed by these active factors of the soul. Pity is helpful, and is not deadened or repelled by circumstances which disgust the simply sensitive nature; and its ardour so far consumes such obstacles to merely emotional sympathy, that the person who truly pities finds the field of pathos extended far beyond the ordinary limits of the dainty passion which gives tears to the eyes of the selfish as well as the self-sacrificing. In an ideally perfect nature, indeed, pity and pathos, which is the feeling of pity, would be coextensive; and the latter would demand for its condition the existence of the former, with some ground of actual reality to work beneficially upon. On the other hand, entire selfishness would destroy even the faintest capacity for discerning pathos in art or circumstance. In the great mass of men and women there is sufficient virtue of pity--pity that would act if it had the opportunity--to extend in them the _feeling_ of pity, that is pathos, to a far larger range of circumstances than their active virtue would be competent to encounter, even if it had the chance.