There is no example, so far as I know, to be found in all history, of men having been stimulated or affected in any important way--none, at any rate, of their having been restrained or curbed--by a mere ideal that was known to have no reality to correspond to it.

A child is frightened when its nurse tells it that a black man will come down the chimney and take it away.

The black man, it is true, is only an ideal; and yet the child is affected.

But it would cease to be affected the instant it knew this.
As we go on with our enquiry these considerations will become plainer to us.

But enough has even now been said to show how distinct the present position is from any that have gone before it, and how little the experience of the past is really fitted to reassure us.