We shall hardly help noting the prominence of “opaque” phrases. “Proofs of stability and improvement”; “noble public buildings”; “treasures of science and the arts”; “this flourishing city”; “a thousand memories”; “this beautiful site”; and “structures reared by man” seem outstanding examples. These all express objects which can be seen only at a distance of time or space. In three instances, it is true, the speaker mentions things of which his hearers might have been immediately and physically conscious, but they receive an appropriately generalized reference. The passage admits not a single intrusive detail, nor is anything there supposed to have a superior validity or probativeness because it is present visibly or tangibly. The speech is addressed to the mind, and correspondingly to the memory.[152] The fact that the inclusiveness was temporal as well as spatial has perhaps special significance for us. This “continuity of the past with the present” gave a dimension which our world seems largely to have lost; and this dimension made possible a different pattern of selection. It is not experiential data which creates a sense of the oneness of experience. It is rather an act of mind; and the practice of periodically bringing the past into a meditative relationship with the present betokens an attitude toward history. In the chapter on Lincoln we have shown that an even greater degree of remoteness is discernible in the First and Second Inaugural Addresses, delivered at a time when war was an ugly present reality. And furthermore, at Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke in terms so “generic” that it is almost impossible to show that the speech is not a eulogy of the men in gray as well as the men in blue, inasmuch as both made up “those who struggled here.” Lincoln’s faculty of transcending an occasion is in fact only this ability to view it from the right distance, or to be wisely generic about it. We are talking here about things capable of extremes, and there is a degree of abstraction which results in imperception; but barring those cases which everyone recognizes as beyond bounds, we should reconsider the idea that such generalization is a sign of impotence. The distinction does not lie between those who are near life and those who are remote from it, but between pertinence and impertinence. The intrusive detail so prized by modern realists does not belong in a picture which is a picture of something. One of the senses of “seeing” is metaphorical, and if one gets too close to the object, one can no longer in this sense “see.” It is the _theoria_ of the mind as well as the work of the senses which creates the final picture.