But does that make any possible difference?
I do not think that it does.

To imagine beauty is really to see it--not objectively, perhaps, but subjectively beyond all possibility of doubt.

Though you see the beauty only in your mind, in your mind it is; and in your mind its ethical influence must operate.

During the time that a man worships even imaginary bodily beauty, he receives some secret glimpse of a higher kind of beauty--beauty of heart and mind.
Was there ever in this world a real lover who did not believe the woman of his choice to be not only the most beautiful of mortals, but also the best in a moral sense?
I do not think that there ever was.
The moral and the ethical sentiments of a being thus aroused call into sudden action all the finer energies of the man--the capacities for effort, for heroism, for high-pressure work of any sort, mental or physical, for all that requires quickness in thought and exactitude in act.

There is for the time being a sense of new power.