make him a much more charming and social and imaginative person than he would otherwise be. But if he wants a future life merely because he regards this life as a "vale of misery"—and wants that future life to contain evil as well as good—a Hell as well as a Heaven (in order that he may visualise retribution meted out on a satisfactory scale upon those whom he cannot satisfactorily visit with retribution to-day) then, I think, that it tends to become bad ornament, and is likely to make him less charming, less social, and less imaginatively inventive for the getting rid of evil conditions from present existence than he would be if he had not so over-loaded his brain with doctrinal adornments.
Still, it is ornament of a kind; and with ornament, good or bad (the moment he has got for himself leisure or any elbow-room at all in the struggle for existence) man cannot help embellishing the facts of life—the things that he really knows.
Now that instinct for embellishment is of course latent in Nature itself, or we should not find it in man; and it comes of Nature (the great super-mathematician) putting two and two together in a way which does not merely make four. When two and two are put together by Nature, they come to life in a new shape; and man is (up-to-date) the most appreciative receptacle of that fact which Nature has yet produced. Man builds up his whole appreciation of life by association—
