THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING Various cultivated critics told me that I should find Jerusalem disappointing; and I fear it will disappoint them that I am not disappointed.

Of the city as a city I shall try to say something elsewhere; but the things which these critics have especially in mind are at once more general and more internal.
They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrines and those who use them.

Now the mistake of critics is not that they criticise the world; it is that they never criticise themselves.
They compare the alien with the ideal; but they do not at the same time compare themselves with the ideal; rather they identify themselves with the ideal.

I have met a tourist who had seen the great Pyramid, and who told me that the Pyramid looked small.
Believe me, the tourist looked much smaller.

There is indeed another type of traveller, who is not at all small in the moral mental sense, who will confess such disappointments quite honestly, as a piece of realism about his own sensations.