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The Philosophical Imagination
The Philosophical
Imagination
Selected Essays
Richard Moran

1
1
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To Borgna
 CO N T E N T S

Acknowledgmentsâ•…â•…ix
Prefaceâ•…â•…xi

PART ONE:╇ Art and Aesthetics

1. The Expression of Feeling in Imaginationâ•…â•… 3
2. Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Forceâ•…â•… 26
3. Artifice and Persuasion: The Work of Metaphor in the Rhetoricâ•…â•…49
4. Kant, Proust, and the Appeal of Beautyâ•…â•… 61
5. Cavell on Recognition, Betrayal, and the Photographic Field
of Expressionâ•…â•…88
6. Proust and the Limits of the Willâ•…â•… 101

PART T WO:╇ Readings of Contemporary Philosophers

7. Cavell on Outsiders and Othersâ•…â•… 123
8. Frankfurt on Identification: Ambiguities of Activity in Mental Lifeâ•…â•… 136
9. On Frankfurt’s The Reasons of Loveâ•…â•…158
10. Iris Murdoch and Existentialismâ•…â•… 169
11. Williams, History, and the “Impurity of Philosophy”â•…â•… 185

PART THREE:╇ Agency and the First Person

12. Interpretation Theory and the First Personâ•…â•… 203
13. Anscombe on Practical Knowledgeâ•…â•… 219
14. Anscombe on the Expression of Intention: An Exegesis [coauthored with
Martin Stone]â•…â•… 240
15. Self-╉Knowledge, “Transparency,” and the Forms of Activityâ•…â•… 275
16. The Story of My Life: Narrative and Self-╉Understanding╅╅ 297

Bibliographyâ•…â•…315
Name Indexâ•…â•… 323
Subject Indexâ•…â•… 325

(â•›viiâ•›)
 AC KNOW L E DG M E N T S

Acknowledgements for the individual papers are given at the end of each paper. I am
grateful to Peter Ohlin of Oxford University Press for his encouragement throughout
the process, and to Sandy Diehl for all his help in turning this material into a book.
I am grateful to the original publishers for permission to reprint the following
essays:
“The Expression of Feeling in Imagination” was first published in The Philosophical
Review, vol. 103, no. 1 (1994): 75–​106. © 1994, Cornell University. All rights
reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present pub-
lisher, Duke University Press.
“Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image and Force” was first published in Critical
Inquiry, vol. 16, no. 1 (Autumn, 1989): 87–​112. © 1989 by The University of Chicago.
“Artifice and Persuasion: The Work of Metaphor in Aristotle’s Rhetoric” was first
published in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, edited by Amelie Rorty (University of
California Press, 1995), 385–​398. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
“Kant, Proust and the Appeal of Beauty” was first published in Critical Inquiry, vol.
38, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 298–​329. © 2012 by The University of Chicago.
“Cavell on Recognition, Betrayal, and the Photographic Field of Expression” was first
published in the Harvard Review of Philosophy, vol. 23 (2016). Reprinted with the
permission of the publisher.
“Cavell on Outsiders and Others” was first published in Revue Intenationale du
Philosophie 256 (2011/​2): 239–​254. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
“Frankfurt on Identification: Ambiguities of Activity in Mental Life” was first pub-
lished in Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, edited by Sarah
Buss and Lee Overton (The MIT Press, 2002), 189–​217. Reprinted with the permis-
sion of the publisher.
“On Frankfurt’s The Reasons of Love” was first published as “Review Essay: On the
Reasons of Love,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74, no. 2 (2007): 463–​
475. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

( ix )
 (x) Acknowledgments

“Iris Murdoch and Existentialism” was first published in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher,
edited by Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 181–​196. By per-
mission of Oxford University Press.
“Bernard Williams, History, and the ‘Impurity of Philosophy’ ” was first published in
European Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 2 (2016): 315–​330. Reprinted with the permis-
sion of the publisher.
“Interpretation Theory and the First Person” was first published in The Philosophical
Quarterly 44, no. 175 (April 1994): 154–​173. Reprinted with the permission of the
publisher.
“Anscombe on Practical Knowledge” was first published in Agency and Action,
eds. J. Hyman & H. Steward, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 55
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 43–​68. Reprinted with the permis-
sion of the publisher.
“Anscombe on the Expression of Intention: An Exegesis” was first published in New
Essays on the Explanation of Action, edited by Constantine Sandis (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 132–​168. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
“Self-​knowledge, ‘Transparency’, and the Forms of Activity” was first published
in Introspection and Consciousness, edited by Declan Smithies and Daniel Stoljar
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 211–​ 238. By permission of Oxford
University Press.
“The Story of My Life: Narrative and Self-​Understanding” was first published as the
2015 Aquinas Lecture, ISBN 9780874621877. © 2015 Marquette University Press.
Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
 P R E FACE

The papers collected here span a considerable range of years and topics, and perhaps
I should begin by expressing my surprise and gratitude that the academic profes-
sion of philosophy can still support work that can be slow in development and that
does not confine itself to a particular sub-​field of the discipline. As an academic field,
philosophy has often been more clear-​sighted and supportive in this respect than
other disciplines, but such wisdom or generosity of spirit is not something that any
of us can take for granted. Particularly for people entering the profession, and espe-
cially outside of the more protected private colleges and universities, academic work
is increasingly being managed on a production model that rewards numbers of pub-
lications, citations, and conferences attended, simply because these are measurable
units and not because of any limited bearing they may have on the intellectual health
of the disciplines themselves. I have benefitted from a different ethos in philosophy
and I maintain the hope that this field will continue to act as a break on the mecha-
nization of academic work.
For the sake of some organization I have grouped the articles in three sec-
tions: papers relating to aesthetic questions, readings of contemporary philosophers
(“contemporary,” that is, with my own introduction to the subject), and papers on
aspects of the first person. These divisions are not entirely factitious, but there is
nonetheless a great deal of overlap in their concerns. In the course of writing these
papers I have normally preferred to work by following up on independent lines of
thought that seemed promising or problematic to me, and ignoring or repressing the
background of common concerns and repeating themes that turn out to have guided
or channeled my thinking across these different domains. Naturally in reading over
these pieces for the collection various connecting themes have struck me that I was
at best dimly aware of at the time I wrote them, and I will say something about a few
of them here.
The word “imagination” in the title of this collection refers to the actual topic
of several of the essays, but it also applies to those papers concerned with differ-
ent topics and which are primarily close discussions of the work of some individual
philosophers who were part of my coming of age into the study of philosophy, and
whose writings in different ways showed me by example something about the ways
that philosophical work depends on the interplay between disciplining and liberating
the imagination.

( xi )
 ( xii ) Preface

In those papers in particular, I am working in a tradition of doing philosophy that

takes the work of reading to be as centrally a form of philosophical thought as any
other, and not a substitute for the real thing. This is perhaps most explicitly the case
in the two papers on Stanley Cavell and the two papers on Elizabeth Anscombe, but it
applies to the other papers that are organized around the work of other philosophers.
Outside of explicitly historical studies, this more interpretive, textual, and recon-
structive tradition of philosophical thought and practice is less widely represented
among philosophers in the Anglophone world, which prides itself, sometimes justly,
on “getting right to the questions themselves.” But even when unacknowledged, the
work of reading is still a form of philosophical teaching and practice that the “ques-
tions themselves” of contemporary discussion emerge out of and are structured by,
and hence the understanding of the “questions themselves,” not to mention the
recovery of forms of questioning fallen outside of contemporary practice, will be
informed by the philosophical discipline of reading. In a somewhat different sense,
the essay “Proust and the Limits of the Will” also belongs to this category of philoso-
phy as an exercise of reading. With respect to the particular forms of understand-
ing (“understanding,” that is, of the philosophical problems themselves) that such a
practice of philosophy makes possible, I have learned the most from the examples of
Bernard Williams and Stanley Cavell.
***
From its beginnings philosophy has often begun with exercises of imagination, or
challenges to the coherence of such exercises. Can I imagine myself existing apart
from my body, or inhabiting a different body altogether? Can I imagine that I was
born of different parents, or that water has a different chemical composition than
H2O, or no internal composition at all? If I describe something as a three-​sided
bounded figure all of whose points are equidistant from the center, have I imag-
ined anything at all? And if I am not in fact imagining anything here, then what is
the right way to describe whatever mental operation I am performing when I frame
that description? Compared to the other operations of the mind such as perceiving
or judging, imagination seems the most unbounded of the forms of thought and
yet philosophy, especially since the Modern period, often proceeds by professing to
discern and draw the boundaries of the imaginable. Carefully constructed acts of
imagination are part of the method of philosophy in everything from the Cogito to
the Original Position, and whole movements in philosophy have defined themselves
by their adherence to some doctrine concerning the limits of what is strictly imag-
inable, on the other side of which lies nonsense, the non-​verifiable, or other fail-
ures at “cognitivity.” And on the contemporary philosophical scene, arguments are
made and unmade on the strength of thought experiments and counter-​examples,
the simple imaginability of a three-​minute fiction. Philosophical progress can hinge
on the demonstrated failure to imagine (to really imagine) some possibility that had
seemed real enough to form the basis of some long-​lived philosophical project. Just
how such activities relate to such things as argument, understanding, and the differ-
ence between resolving questions and merely shutting them down, are all still dimly
understood by the practitioners themselves, and philosophy is currently in a phase of
heightened self-​consciousness about the nature and the limits of our dependence on
 Preface ( xiii )

the methods of imagination, and about what is distinctive about the forms it takes in
philosophy as compared with literature, drama, or personal fantasy.
In addition to being in these ways part of philosophical methodology, the nature
of imagination and its objects is of course also one of the topics of philosophy, and
figures as such in several of the essays here. One question taken up in “The Expression
of Feeling in Imagination” is whether the forms of imagination expressed in the vari-
ous ways of responding emotionally to fictions should be understood in terms of the
imagining of various “fictional truths” about one’s own condition. A related question
discussed toward the end of the essay is how to understand certain forms of refusal to
imagine some aspect of a world presented to us in fiction, what I call there “imagina-
tive resistance.” The essay on “Iris Murdoch and Existentialism” is in part concerned
with the forms of imagination that are effortful in a different way and can require
a certain emotional work from the person, and draw on different resources within
the person than, e.g., following some hypothetical reasoning or rotating a mental
image, with corresponding differences in the possibilities for the failure of imagina-
tion and the meaning of such failure. In these essays as well as those on metaphor
I am also trying to describe some of the forms of thought that are non-​propositional
or semi-​propositional, and the difficulties in accommodating them within the stan-
dard philosophical alternatives of the cognitive and the non-​cognitive, conceiving of
some possibility or failing to do so.
The possibility and the meaning of imagining something occupies an especially
problematic place in relation to the experiences and lives of other people, and this is
under discussion in the essay “Interpretation Theory and the First Person,” “Cavell
on Outsiders and Others,” and “Self-​knowledge, ‘Transparency’, and the Forms of
Activity.” It is sometimes said that we cannot really imagine the experiences of other
people, that all we can do is imagine our own experience and “transfer” it to the case
of others. If this were right, it would make the role of imagination in understanding
others look like little more than the projection of one’s own point of view onto oth-
ers, and both the theory of “mental simulation” and of “rationalizing interpretation”
face the challenge that what is presented as the very form of understanding another
person can seem to be simply the imposition of a preferred scheme of interpreta-
tion or of one’s own point of view. In another way, an act of empathetic imagina-
tion is sometimes presented as a way of overcoming the separateness of persons,
bridging the gap between one mind and another by an act of imaginative identifi-
cation. The ideal is often represented as apprehending the thought and experience
of another person “from the inside,” as if one’s own, or coming as close as possible
through sympathetic identification to annulling the distinction between one subjec-
tivity and another. The paper “Cavell on Outsiders and Others” examines the role of
imagination in both the framing of the skeptical problem of other minds and in the
picture of what a solution to such skepticism should look like. As with the idea of
“sympathetic identification,” the skeptical scenario has difficulty framing an idea
of what overcoming such skepticism would be that does not amount to the effacing
of the distinctness of individual persons itself, as that is expressed in the irreducible
differences between the first-​person point of view and that of others. If skepticism
about the knowability of another mind is expressed as the impossibility of “bridging
 ( xiv ) Preface

the gap” between one mind and another, then we are pictured as each being trapped
within a single point of view, unable to make contact with a different one. On such
a framing of the problem, what would presumably satisfy the skeptic would be if,
per impossibile, the differences between one subjectivity and another could ideally be
overcome, and one would relate to the thoughts and experiences of another person
as though they were one’s own. However, even as unreachable ideal this scenario can
equally look more like a surrender to solipsism than its solution, for in “overcoming”
the distinction of individual points of view the number of minds one can conceive of
or relate to will once again have been reduced to one.
The idea of the irreducible distinctness of the first-​person perspective, and with
it the self-​other asymmetries in mind and action, has been found problematic in
many different parts of philosophy and several philosophical projects are animated
by the desire to show that distinctness to be an illusion or something to be over-
come in a properly “impersonal” perspective (“impersonal” either in the sense of an
impartial moral perspective or an objectively scientific one). As opposed to these
trends of thought, my earlier book, Authority and Estrangement, argues for the essen-
tiality and irreducibility of the first-​person point of view in the understanding of
mind and action, and this is also a thematic concern in several of the papers here.
“Interpretation Theory and the First Person” looks at certain strategies for asserting
the primacy of either the first-​or the third-​person perspective on attitudes such as
belief, and argues that the idea of a univocal meaning of a concept like belief across
its first-​and third-​person expressions requires the appreciation of the distinct but
complementary roles it plays in, e.g., the declaration of one’s conviction and in the
explanation of behavior.
A similar insistence on the reality and ineliminability of distinct but complemen-
tary perspectives on the intentional phenomena of mind and action also informs
several of the other essays in the collection. This is clear enough in the papers on
self-​knowledge and action, and in the paper “Anscombe and Practical Knowledge”
in particular I am unearthing from her text an understanding of the constitutive
role played by the agent’s point of view, the idea of the agent’s practical knowledge
as the “formal cause” of the intentional action in question. The paper aims to work
out an understanding of this notion that also does justice to the fact that, since the
truth of any action description depends on what is or is not happening in the world,
there will always be an external, and perhaps competing, perspective on what is
or is not getting done. In a different way, the insistence on the duality of perspec-
tives is also thematic in the essay “Bernard Williams, History, and the ‘Impurity of
Philosophy.’ ” I argue there that, as with intentional actions, historical events (e.g.,
political events) concern practices and institutions that are constituted by forms of
self-​understanding which are internal to them. As such, historical forms of under-
standing cannot abstract from such forms of understanding, either at the level of
the practices themselves or at the level of the historical actors who conceive of their
actions in terms of those practices, and still have, e.g., a political historical phenome-
non in view. At the same time, historical understanding cannot be confined to either
of these internal perspectives, either as an attempt at “imaginative reconstruction”
of the thought of the historical actors or as the regulative ideal of a Gadamerian
 Preface ( xv )

“fusing of horizons” of the historian and that of the historical period or the human
events themselves. The duality of perspectives in historiography is not something to
be overcome but is definitive of the phenomena in question, and the ways they both
depend on and may conflict with each other belong to the forms of understanding
and explanation advanced in the study of history.
The essay “The Story of My Life: Narrative and Self-​Understanding” concerns nar-
rative as a particular way of understanding human events and also takes up a related
set of questions. The idea of “life as a story” is often presented as a way to capture a
particular form of self-​understanding, and a privileged form of presenting “life as it
is lived,” as compared with other possible forms of account. It is as an unfolding story
that a person’s life is experienced by the person “from the inside.” At the same time,
the very invocation of “storytelling” brings with it the distinction of roles between
the teller of the story and the subject of the story, even when these are one and the
same person. Various contemporary endorsements of the idea of “life as a story”
as well as certain critiques of that idea share the assumption that when these two
perspectives fail to coincide, when the facts as told in the story are different from, or
unrecognizable within, the “lived experience” of the person whose story is being told,
that must mean that the story is distorting or falsifying the life. However, there is no
more reason to think this is true of narrative than it is of any other form of account,
and even when a story does concern an individual human life (which is after all only
a particular case among the range of kinds of story), it will encompass a multiplicity
of points of view which do not resolve into that of a single subjectivity.
Another theme of several of the papers is that of the varieties of the active/​pas-
sive distinction in philosophy, most obviously in the papers mentioning this in their
titles (“Self-​knowledge, ‘Transparency’ and the Forms of Activity,” “Frankfurt on
Identification: Ambiguities of Activity in Mental Life”), but also in the papers on
action, and the paper on Iris Murdoch. A guiding thought here is that contemporary
philosophy often operates with an impoverished understanding of rational agency
and the intentional phenomena that are its domain. For a broad range of human
responses, to invoke reasons may seem to make one guilty of “intellectualism” of one
sort or another, and to invoke “agency” may seem to require a kind of “voluntarism”
or the idea that the person is thought to normally exert a kind of managerial control
over his own attitudes.
Harry Frankfurt, for instance, insists that the fundamental human response of
caring about something or someone is neither something that is arrived at by any
form of reasoning nor is it something that the person can produce for himself by an
act of will or simple “fiat.” In a different register, Iris Murdoch indulges in a familiar
caricature of Sartre’s relentless invocations of “positing one’s freedom” with respect
to one’s cares and commitments in presenting him as saying that these can only be the
product of arbitrary choice by the “giddy, empty” will. More than anyone Frankfurt
has opened up the topic of caring about something for philosophical reflection in the
broadly analytic tradition, and he is surely right that what a person cares about is not
the conclusion of any reasoning and is often experienced by the person as something
they could not change and have no wish to change. But these truths do not make
caring about something a passive or non-​rational state like a headache or coughing
 ( xvi ) Preface

fit, states of a person which are not “about” or “directed upon” the world at all. By
contrast, and however much a matter of necessitation for the person, caring remains
an intentionally directed attitude of the person and as such is an expression of his or
her responsiveness to reasons, which in the broadest sense means responsiveness to
the multiplicity of the ways the world can be and can matter to us. This multiplicity
is not restricted to the true and the good, or the inferential relations between beliefs.
For example, finding something bizarre or amusing is one such way the world can
appear to us, and laughter is one such response. The fact that we cannot either come
to care about something or find something funny by “fiat” does not show that these
are anything like passive non-​intentional states such as headaches or ringing in the
ears. It rather shows the contrary, that caring and finding funny belong to the world
of rational agency along with (but of course quite different from) belief, and are unre-
sponsive to “fiat” for the same sorts of reasons as belief is. Laughter itself is not a
form of judgment, and is not the sort of thing that is arrived at as the conclusion of
some reasoning. Nor is laughter typically voluntarily produced. But nor is laughing
like coughing, or anything else genuinely passive and non-​cognitive. One basic differ-
ence between them is that laughter, but not coughing, is occasioned by understanding
something. In learning what is or what is not capable of making someone laugh and
how (i.e., whether bitterly, mockingly, ruefully, etc.), we learn something about what
they care about, and what kind of caring is in question. A person bears a distinctive
form of answerability for what he cares about or what makes him laugh, which shows
up in the fact that a distinctive form of the question “why?” applies to both, different
from the question of what made someone cough, and we typically take the person
himself to be the singularly relevant person to ask why he laughed or why he cares in
these ways because these are expressions of his own point of view. These are aspects
of a person’s active nature, though not in the sense of arbitrary choice or the exer-
tion of control, and the role of reasons here does not relate to proof or demonstra-
tion but to the specific forms of intelligibility and self-​intelligibility in the domain in
question. (This is a point taken up in “Self-​knowledge, ‘Transparency’, and the Forms
of Activity,” and is one way that the question of activity and passivity relates to the
question of the distinctiveness of the first-​person point of view.)
The themes of activity and passivity, the distinctiveness of the first-​person point
of view, the need and the effort to imagine the point of view of another person,
the overcoming of solipsism, and the internal limits of an ideal of control are all
themes that are woven together in Proust’s great novel with an unsurpassed density
and tenacity. The previously unpublished essay “Proust and the Limits of the Will”
recapitulates many of the themes of the other essays in this collection, and makes
a first stab at bringing out some of the philosophical contours of Proust’s project.
Several of these themes are also present in the papers I have published relating to
speech, testimony, and intersubjectivity, but these are not collected here since they
are assimilated in the book that Oxford University Press will be bringing out under
the title, The Exchange of Words. In a few cases I have made minor changes or correc-
tions to the papers re-​printed here.
 PA RT ON E

Art and Aesthetics

 1

The Expression of Feeling

in Imagination

W hat has come to be known as the problem of “fictional emotions,” that is, emo-
tional responses directed upon what are known to be fictional characters and
events, presents a useful case for considering the relations between philosophical
theorizing about the arts and the critical and artistic thinking that is more internal
to the practice and reception of the arts themselves. As an intellectual problem, it
provides one good place for investigating what sort of need it is that current philo-
sophical aesthetics is meant to answer to, and how it answers to that need. For it
is, of course, not only philosophers who have been theoretically concerned with the
place of feeling in aesthetic response. The question of the legitimate role (if any) of
emotion in the reception of, for example, literature and theater, is itself a sharply
contested matter with its own history, and it’s not hard to see the conflicts over this
role as defining many of the most consequential developments in the arts over the
past century. In this connection, we may recall such developments as the nineteenth-​
century reaction against Romanticism, and later against Victorian sentimentalism;
Modernism and the suspicion of dramatic emotion as a form of bad faith; the theo-
rization of the role of feeling in the theater of Brecht or of Artaud; or the rejection
of all forms of mere empathy in favor of the identification of the power of art with
the ability to scandalize or unsettle. Whether or not philosophical aesthetics can
or should contribute to such debates themselves, it does seem an imperative upon
any good philosophical analysis of the role of emotion in the mimetic arts that such
critical and artistic struggle should remain comprehensible within such an account. It
ought to put us in a better position to understand what is at stake in, for example,
the difference between being moved and being manipulated, or between emotional
responsiveness and voyeurism.
The problem of emotions and fictions that occupies the attention of contempo-
rary philosophers, however, poses the prior question of how it is so much as pos-
sible for a person to get emotionally worked up over what she knows to be unreal,
merely fictional. One of my claims will be that aspects of the philosophical construal

(3)
 (4) Expression of Feeling in Imagination

of the phenomenon of fictional emotions give a misleading picture of our relations

to fictions in general, and make it more rather than less difficult to pose the sorts of
critical questions about art and emotional engagement just mentioned. On a better
understanding of imagination and feeling, the metaphysical problem of fiction and
emotion should not arise. Part of the remedy, I will suggest, lies in loosening the grip
of a concept of imagination that is exclusively concerned with the representation
of various states of affairs, that restricts interest in it to the imagining of various
fictional truths, and thus suggests an unreal discontinuity between what and how
we imagine and our real-​life engagements in everyday life. The relation between such
engagements and our acts of imagining in fictional contexts is examined in the final
section of the paper, which discusses a problem from Hume concerning the phenom-
enon of moral and emotional resistance in imagination.

1.

In many ways the best and most comprehensive contemporary discussion of the
problem of fictional emotion is found in Kendall Walton’s recent book Mimesis as
Make-​Believe,1 and I will begin by using it as representative of the current formu-
lation of the problem and the space of possible solutions. The general form of the
problem, however, and the general picture of aesthetic response that gives rise to
it are widely represented in philosophical discussion. The core of Walton’s theory of
representation, in general, and the emotional response to representations, in par-
ticular, is the development of a concept of make-​believe. And this concept, in turn,
is explicated in terms of games played with props of various kinds (for example, a
hobby horse, a painting) in which various propositions are imagined as true, which is
to say that it is a prescription of the game that various propositions are to be treated
as true-​in-​the-​fiction, or “fictionally true” (where this need not exclude their hap-
pening to be actually true as well). These will include such things as, say, that the
doll in one’s lap is a baby, that one is witnessing the slaying of Macbeth, or that one
is looking at Washington Crossing the Delaware. And such fictional truths will also
include, crucially, such propositions as that one is now experiencing fear and pity for
the tragic hero, or that one feels the satisfactions of vengeance when rough justice is
meted out to the deserving. None of this is to deny that the audience may be really
feeling something, indeed, something very intense. It’s just not the same thing as
real fear or pity (247). And Walton doesn’t claim that one cannot also feel genuine
fear in the theater, only that one need not feel it when one is in the familiar situation
we call being “caught up in the experience.”2

1. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-​Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1990). The page numbers cited in the text are to this work.
2. Two final points: Walton seems to agree that the feelings we experience in response to
artworks are not purely voluntarily produced, as the analogy with games of make-​believe
might suggest (242). And last, if he claims that we don’t really care about Emma Bovary or
Roderick Spade, he insists that we do care a great deal about the experience of fictionally
caring about such things, and are not irrational to do so (271).
 Expression of Feeling in Imagination ( 5)

A decisive moment in the development of any philosophical theory is the step

when some paradox is generated out of something that looked familiar and innocu-
ous. So in this case, we might ask, where exactly is the paradox in experiencing lust or
fear or sadness elicited by what one knows to be a fictional representation? The rough
idea seems to be that, say, to be afraid you must think you’re in some kind of danger,
and yet you know that the apparent object of your apparent fear is not real, so you
know you are not in danger, and yet you seem to be stricken with fear. And to put
Walton’s account in drastically abbreviated terms: the answer to this problem is that
one is experiencing what he calls “quasi-​fear,” pretending to really be afraid, as part
of a game of make-​believe in which the movie or story is a prop. Among the fictional
truths being imagined here are propositions concerning what one is feeling, as well as
those concerning fictional characters and events.
However, to get some perspective on our original situation of fear-​at-​the-​movies
(or the theater, etc.), we should consider the more general phenomenon of emotion-
ally charged relations to what is known to be in some sense nonactual. For the gen-
eration of a paradox of fictional emotions requires a contrast with some central set of
unproblematic cases of emotional responses, cases that do not raise such questions,
and that presumably involve responses to real persons and events to which we are
actually present. And yet at the same time, it is not clear to what extent the para-
digms of our emotional involvements, which the fictional cases should be deviations
from, do in fact fit such a pattern. To begin with, think of our concern, emotional and
otherwise, directed at various modal facts; things that might have happened to us
but didn’t, things we might have done, how things could have turned out differently.
Such attitudes are central instances of ordinary emotional responses, and it is central
to them that they are directed upon “what might have been.” Or, for a different type
of case, think of spontaneous empathetic reactions such as wincing and jerking your
hand back when someone else nearby slices into his hand, even though you know
that you are in no danger of cutting yours. The case could be made to look paradoxical
(“wincing in someone else’s pain”), but removing this sort of thing from our paradigm
set of ordinary emotional responses would leave us with an artificially restricted idea
of a norm for emotions. Similarly, the person who says that it still makes her shud-
der just to think about her driving accident, or her first date, is exhibiting one of the
paradigms of emotional response, not an exception to the norm. Now admittedly
these will be responses to some real event, even if in the past. Nonetheless, I think
the comparison with the case of fiction is still appropriate here since if shuddering
in a movie theater is paradoxical, then so ought to be shuddering sitting safely at
home years after one’s experience. And even if one were inclined to consider them
both irrational somehow, one would thereby lose what was supposed to be distinctive
about the fictional case.
Rather, it begins to look like comparatively little of one’s emotional attention
concerns objects in the actual here and now. Indeed, it does often appear as though
most of the suffering and satisfaction in life takes place either prior to the expected
events that are supposed to deliver the real goods or after the fact, savored in remem-
brance or sticking in one’s craw, as the case may be. And the intuitions of our every-
day psychology appear deeply ambivalent concerning such temporal perspectives.
Relief, regret, remorse, and nostalgia are, after all, among the paradigm cases of
 (6) Expression of Feeling in Imagination

emotional response; and although they are essentially backward-​looking, they are
not commonly thought to present any special puzzle among the emotions. But at the
same time, from within everyday psychology we have also to confront the proverbial
injunction against crying over spilt milk, which can itself seem very puzzling. After
all, if we can’t cry after the milk is spilled, when can we cry? Presumably not upon
confronting the milk still safely in the bottle.
A related ambivalence obtains in our intuitions with respect to longer-​term rela-
tions to the past. Yet even though something about the nonactuality of what one
is focusing on is indeed pointed to in such expressions, these emotions and their
objects don’t look like they demand explanation as deviations from the normal con-
ceptual requirements of emotions. Responses like these are the norm, in terms of
which anything different would have to be explained. Naturally, it is not the case that
just any possibility, however remote, provides an appropriate object for emotional
response. There is surely something wrong with the reaction of Grimm’s Clever Else
to the contemplation of a far-​off possible misfortune. And different emotion types
will vary a great deal in their fittingness with differences in temporal perspective
and distance from the actual. My claim at this point is not that actuality or fictional-
ity never make a difference to the appropriateness of some emotional reaction, but
rather that our paradigms of ordinary emotions exhibit a great deal of variety in this
respect, and that the case of fictional emotions gains a misleading appearance of
paradox from an inadequate survey of examples. (In a restricted way, the following
section discusses some of the differences in specifically artistic fictions that contrib-
ute to making the connection between the bare possibility of some event and the
actual engagement with one’s emotional life.)
In connection with the idea that, say, the emotion of fear requires belief in the
present actuality of danger to oneself, it is worth noting that the horror movie exam-
ple of Walton’s that is the test case throughout his discussion, as well as many others,
is in important respects a nonstandard case of the inducement of feeling at the mov-
ies. And the atypical feature of this case produces a much sharper sense of paradox
than would be provided by other more ordinary cases. For the situation involves a
horror movie in which the monster fixes its gaze on the camera and then proceeds in
the direction of attacking the viewers, and not toward any character in the film (196).
The sense of paradox here gains from the implied contrast with the analogous situa-
tion outside the movie theater: if you were really under such a threat, then recoiling
in horror would make sense, but here you are aware that this is only fictional, and
therefore your response may appear puzzling.
However, suppose the example were of the more usual case of fear and horror
experienced at a movie in which it is the characters on the screen who are subject to
gruesome attacks of various kinds. Here the real-​life counterpart situation would be
that of really seeing someone else attacked and then recoiling in fear and horror. This
sort of real-​life reaction is not itself any more paradoxical than the first real-​life case
of recoiling from a threat to oneself. But notice that this type of case involves features
that are adduced as contributing to the paradoxical character of the original case of
fictional emotion involving the movie monster advancing toward the camera. For in
seeing someone else attacked, I may be well aware that I am in no danger myself. I am
 Expression of Feeling in Imagination ( 7)

not at that moment confusing myself with the other person, and yet I am wincing as
if in pain, recoiling as from a threat, filled with fear and horror. But this is the real-​life
situation, which is not supposed to raise the same questions as the fictional situation
does. It is in failing to conform to this real-​life paradigm that the fictional cases are
to be considered paradoxical. The fictional analogue to this ordinary case of empathy
is the more usual case of experiencing horror directed at what is happening to the
victims on the screen (that is, rather than fear for one’s own safety and bodily integ-
rity). Hence this would serve much less well as an example to stimulate the sense of
paradox, for it would raise the question of just how different the fictional situation is
from the real-​life situation. It might be objected at this point that we at least have to
believe that the attack is real in order to experience horror, but I think this needn’t
be so. One’s reaction may be similar, for example, to the extreme discomfort most
people feel who are witnessing surgery for the first time, even if they are aware that
no one is currently feeling any pain. One might still wonder whether it is precisely
fear that is felt in witnessing another’s pain, but whatever we want to call it, the affect
and the recoiling in horror don’t seem essentially different from what goes on in the
movie theater, which is the original phenomenon to be accounted for.3

2.

It is unlikely that the various responses we classify with the emotions form any-
thing like a natural kind: some are more tied to judgments than are others, some
require more in the way of definite objects than do others, some are more socially
structured than others, some are more deliberately cultivated than others, some are
more simply and passively contagious than are others. For this reason, it is unlikely
that there could even in principle be a general problem of fictional emotions. Even
the paradigm theatrical responses of laughter and tears do not parallel each other
here. For whatever air of paradox there might be in the idea of pity or fear directed
at what are mere characters, there is none at all in the idea of, say, mirth and mer-
riment directed at events one knows to be staged, or at tales concerning salesmen
or chickens who never really lived. Nor, I think, are various other aesthetically rel-
evant feelings, such as pleasure, boredom, disgust, anxiety, or suspense, conceptually
dependent on any beliefs about the real existence of their objects. (And how different
from varieties of disgust is the horror experienced at many horror movies, the cen-
tral and favored example for generating the paradox of fictional emotions?) And it is
not only the variety of what we call emotions, but also the lack of sharp boundaries
between them, that casts doubt on the idea of a general philosophical problem of
emotions and fictions. There is a continuum of cases, from the types of emotions that

3. For further discussion of some of these issues, including responses from Walton, see
the symposium discussion of Mimesis as Make-​Believe in Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 51 (1991): 379–​431. See also Noel Carroll’s discussion of Walton in The Philosophy
of Horror (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990).
 (8) Expression of Feeling in Imagination

fall outside the problem altogether (for example, surprise) and the diverse cases of
fear, or pity, or vengeful satisfaction, which would seem our best candidates for para-
dox. Many of the most aesthetically relevant emotional responses will lie somewhere
between these poles.
The sentiments that are tapped by works of art are various not only in the thoughts
and feelings associated with them, but in their sources in the person, in their kinds of
directedness, and in their relation to the thing that most immediately elicits them. Their
directedness need not always require a full-​fledged intentional object. If people can
respond with emotion to some nonfigurative work of painting or music, which provides
no scenario for them to make-​believe is true, then perhaps what makes the difference
between works that are emotionally engaging and those that aren’t is not a matter of
aptness for make-​believe or the generation of additional fictional truths, but rather a
difference in certain other features. In the theater, for instance, we might think of the
various nonmimetic effects of such things as music (including song), lighting, figura-
tive language, pacing, and compression of time, and other effects that provide emo-
tional punctuation and tone, but do not necessarily represent anything themselves, and
indeed may be quite mimetically out of place in the scene presented. They may thus
directly impair the aptness for make-​believe, without contributing any additional fic-
tional truths of their own, while yet being directly responsible for the emotional involve-
ment of the audience.
The philosophical paradox of fictional emotions, however, is constructed by the
separation of these sources and aspects of aesthetic emotion from those relating
more directly to mimetic features. In framing the philosophical problem, the implied
contrast is always with the real thing, because the very thing to be explained is how
(awareness of) fictionality is compatible with the appearance of genuine emotional
attitudes. This naturally encourages the idea that it is the sense of fictionality that
needs to be overcome, or diminished, or distracted from, if we are to make sense of
such responses. And this, in turn, encourages the idea that artificiality, the assertion
of the status of the work as artifact, or the elaboration of conspicuous features that
play no role in the construction of any fictional truths, must detract from emotional
engagement in thus detracting from the coherence of the fictional world depicted.
It is, I believe, the framing of the original problem itself that leads the mind in this
direction, and not just among philosophers but also on the part of some of those
seeking to keep their audiences stimulated. So it makes sense along these lines that
among the features that Walton sees as typically inhibiting psychological participa-
tion are such things as the “conspicuous brush strokes on the surface of Van Gogh’s
Starry Night” (277), and in general what he calls the ornamental features of art-
works that highlight the artificial character of the prop.4 As he says in the section
called “Appreciation without Participation,” “gratuitously flowery or alliterative or

4. In this his ideas are not so different from those of various Modernist writers, such as
Bertolt Brecht, concerning what makes for alienation and the preservation of emotional
distance in the theater. See, for example, “A Short Organum for the Theater,” in Brecht on
Theater, ed. and trans. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964).
 Expression of Feeling in Imagination ( 9)

otherwise self-​conscious language may take on a life of its own, calling attention to
itself at the expense of the thing described” (276).
Walton’s point is not to take sides in any dispute between aesthetic Formalists,
Realists, or others, but rather to say something about the sources of emotional
engagement with mimetic works. Nonetheless it does seem that if we arrive at this
conclusion about the various formal and figurative elements of a work, we must have
been going after the problem of emotional participation the wrong way around. For
it would appear to be the very features of the work that do indeed detract from the
realistic presentation of the fictional world that actually enhance, and don’t inhibit,
the intensity and richness of one’s emotional involvement with it. We know that
Starry Night would not really be more emotionally engaging if Van Gogh had calmed
down and left out all that overwrought brush work. And the highly artificial, figura-
tive, self-​conscious language spoken, for example, by Macbeth does not interfere with
our ability to be gripped by the play and his situation. So we seem to have gone wrong
somewhere. The very expressive qualities that disrupt any sense of a fictional world
are in fact central for our psychological participation with artworks. But if such emo-
tional engagement is to be explained in terms of the imagining of various fictional
truths, about the fictional world and about one’s relation to it, it seems that this is
just what should not be so.
It will be helpful in thinking about this to compare different ways of presenting
fictional truths. There are, after all, many different kinds of fictional representation,
and it is only some representations of, say, even quite frightening things that induce
even quasi-​fear. When we consider the variety of representations there are (stick
figures, case histories, billboards, …), it is clear that most do not induce any such
thing. For instance, few tears are shed over the Cliff Notes of even the most lurid
tales, and some genres of writing—​medical or military, for instance—​find it impor-
tant to drain the language of anything that may induce affective response. And yet
these will often describe some pretty nasty situations. Merely to add greater length
or descriptive fidelity needn’t make any difference to their effectiveness either. So
what is it that needs to be altered or added to such a representation for it to be capa-
ble of inducing anything like fear? The answer encouraged by both problem and solu-
tion as presented lies, I think, in the direction of cultivating the sense of realism on
the part of the audience, the sense that what they are witnessing is really there and
they are present to it. This sort of answer is also encouraged by the prominent role
of the example of movies, especially horror movies, in many recent discussions of
responses to fictions.
But if we get away from this example for a while and consider written works, things
may look different. Going from a straight, “flat,” uninspiring description of some
event to an emotionally charged one is typically not a matter of making the account
more and more faithful to real life. Nor are the transformations of style and detail rel-
evant to emotional responsiveness typically those that move in the direction of mak-
ing the work itself—​the writing itself—​withdraw from sight by deflecting attention
from formal or material features of the medium. Instead what are typically involved
are all the resources of figuration, allusion, rhythm, repetition, assonance, and dis-
sonance; all elements that make what we are reading or hearing less like something
 ( 10 ) Expression of Feeling in Imagination

that we could make-​believe is real, or a true record of anything. And after all, it is the
use of rhetorical tropes and techniques like these that is responsible for the ancient
charge against rhetoric itself that it is mere appealing to the emotions; but the way
such rhetorical features work on the emotions does not seem to rely on either believ-
ing or making-​believe something to be the case.
Such expressive qualities of a work, and their central role in engaging the emo-
tional life of reader or audience, don’t seem to find a natural place within the theory
of make-​believe, or the original problem to which it is a solution. Not only don’t they
usually contribute to making something fictionally true, but they introduce elements
that are often impossible to imagine as part of any fictional world. And yet their con-
tribution to what the audience feels is direct and profound. If eliminating them made
a work more apt as a generator of fictional truths, the work would also by that very
fact lose most of its emotional power. The language put into the mouth of someone
like Macbeth is fairly remote from anything one could imagine anyone really speak-
ing, and it would be an unrewarding exercise to imagine a different world in which
ordinary people actually expressed themselves that way. But in the right hands, it is
the very features responsible for this resistance to make-​believe that are responsible
for one’s emotional involvement in the scene, as in his haunted soliloquy on sleep.

—​the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast. (Macbeth, 2.2)

What engages the audience’s emotion in such language is not either imagining
that someone could really be talking this way, or making believe that sleep is some-
thing that both knits and is eaten and is bathed in. Such category crossing would be
avoided if, instead of this speech, Macbeth had simply said, “I could really use a rest.”
And then in some sense the distance between our world and the fictional world of
the play would be less, but our distance from Macbeth and his state of mind, or the
consciousness of the play itself, would be much greater.
The difference in self-​consciousness and artifice between unobtrusive language
and the language actually used in the play is not a difference that must be com-
pensated for in other ways if the speech is to engage the emotions of the audience.
Rather, it is just such artifice in rhythm and figuration that is directly responsible for
the ability of these lines to elicit any feeling. And this is largely because these features
do not just make the language picturesque but are expressive of a certain complex
attitude toward sleep, and exile from it, at this moment in the play. The outlandish
character of some of the comparisons, the rhythm of the relentless piling up of image
upon image, like an obsessive thought, the very unreality of it—​these things are
directly productive of feeling on the part of the audience, and not through their role,
if any, in make-​believe. It is undeniable that the emotions are engaged by something
we call imagination here, but it would be forcing things to construe the imagination
relevant here as making-​believe that some set of propositions is fictionally true. The
 Expression of Feeling in Imagination ( 11 )

point is not that figuration and other expressive qualities constitute a counterexam-
ple to a particular theory of fictional emotions but that the role of fictionality in the
original presentation of the paradox points in the wrong direction for understanding
the role of emotion in aesthetic response. For it is such expressive qualities of a work
that typically make the difference between representations that are arousing and
those that aren’t, and these very qualities, like those of expressive brush strokes or
highly chromatic colors, not only disrupt the closure of the fictional world, but typi-
cally contribute nothing of their own to the generation of fictional truths about the
world depicted. The fictional nature of what is responded to needn’t raise any special
question about the coherence of one’s emotional response, and the constructing and
imagining of fictional truths does not account for the difference made by those rep-
resentations that actually do engage the emotions. There is nothing in the artificial
character of expressive qualities that needs to be compensated for on the side of the
imagining of fictional truths.

3.

The role of imagination is obviously crucial in all of these examples, and to that
extent I am not in disagreement with Walton or other theorists of fictional emotions.
At issue, however, is whether “imagination” has a uniform and explanatory meaning
in the various cases. The sense of “imagination” I have been drawing attention to in
the examples of the effects of figurative language has less to do with simply imagin-
ing something to be the case, or imagining doing or feeling something, and more to
do with what we ordinarily think of as “imaginativeness.” This concerns the ability
to make connections between various things, to notice and respond to the network of
associations that make up the mood or emotional tone of a work. So it will include,
for instance, the ability and inclination to attend to the associations of innocence
and death in Macbeth’s speech; or the recurrence of imagery of the routines of eat-
ing, bathing, sleeping, mending—​the rhythm of the domestic household of which
he is host, and whose peace and security he has just outraged; or even the ability
to appreciate the contrast and disanalogy in some figurative comparison (the “rav-
elled sleave of care,” indeed). Someone who lacks imagination in this sense is not
handicapped by the inability to imagine some state of affairs. It would not be like the
inability to hear a tune in one’s head or the inability to rotate the mental image of a
cube for an experimental psychologist. Imagination comes in many varieties, as does
its relation to rationality as well and its relation to what we feel. Perfectly normal
people may vary a great deal in their abilities to exercise the kind of imaginativeness
just described, and possession of the ability itself is very much a matter of degree.
By contrast, if a person can engage in counterfactual reasoning at all, he should be
able to imagine the truth of any proposition he understands, in the sense of mak-
ing a simple hypothetical supposition. It would call for a rather special explanation
if, in response to the instruction to imagine, say, that you have five apples and lose
two of them, you were to reply, “I can’t seem to imagine that; could you make it
five oranges instead?” An inability to imagine of this kind, that applied to just some
 ( 12 ) Expression of Feeling in Imagination

of the propositions one understands, would raise questions of a very different kind
from the partial or selective ability to make connections in a network of metaphori-
cal associations or, say, to put oneself in the place of someone one has wronged.
What sort of imagination is relevant to one’s emotional engagement with fictions,
and what is it directed upon? On Walton’s account, it is essential that part of what
is imagined has a content referring to oneself (28–​35). So in addition to imagining
Macbeth’s fear and apprehension and sleeplessness, I imagine that I myself am in
some congruent emotional state. But on any philosophical account of such responses,
the relevant imagining is held to require something more than the simple counter-
factual supposition of some proposition or set of propositions. We don’t expect much
pity or terror from just a synopsis of the fictional truths prescribed by the plot of
Macbeth. So at this point, philosophers will often appeal to something called “vivid-
ness” to account for the difference between simply accepting something as fictionally
true (or “to be imagined”) and the imagination involved in getting caught up in the
story. It remains to be seen, however, whether this notion can be understood in a way
that is independent of the phenomenon of fictional emotion itself, so that it can be
(partially) explanatory of it. When someone speaks of an especially vivid memory,
and this doesn’t simply mean that it is a memory that is still charged with emotion
for her, it is usually a visual memory of some sort that the person has in mind.5 But
an especially clear or vivid memory, even when it is a visual memory, does not mean
a memory-​image that is especially clear and sharp in outline or bright in color. As far
as brightness and clarity of the image go, you might be in no better position than
someone who has no memory of the event when it comes to knowing what event it
is, who the people represented in the image are, or even that it is a memory-​image
rather than an invention. And yet nothing could count as a vivid memory that didn’t
include intentional awareness of these other sorts.6 And similar considerations apply
to the difference between vivid and nonvivid imaginings. Even in those cases where
the imagining does involve a mental image of some sort, vividness is not given by any
phenomenological features of that image.
Rather than looking to the phenomenological content, Walton’s account looks
instead to a difference in propositional content to explain fictional emotion, the dif-
ference made by imagining, for example, the fictional truth “I am now experiencing
fear” (242). It seems that this idea is meant to replace the (empty) appeal to vividness
in other accounts to describe the difference between imagining with or without emo-
tional engagement. Otherwise, if there will still be a difference between the vivid and
the nonvivid on the level of the first-​person imagining that, for example, I am griev-
ing, it would seem that we will not have gained anything in appealing to first-​person
imaginings in the first place. In fact, I believe, an appeal to self-​referring content of
imagining can do no better than an appeal to the qualitative features of the image to

5. In the case of nonvisual memories, it’s even less clear that vividness could mean any-
thing other than the sense of emotional engagement we are trying to explicate.
6. This, of course, is one of the lessons of the later work of Wittgenstein.
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 Ninth Day.

ou must expect to go out, some

day, like the snuff of a
candle; a man can die but once.

Little Dorrit.

Energy and determination have done

wonders many a time.

Bleak House.

Ride on over all obstacles, and win

the race.

David Copperfield.

In journeys, as in life, it is a great deal easier

to go down hill than up.

Nicholas Nickleby.

Let there be union among us.

Mr. Pecksniff.
 Tenth Day.

mong men who have sound and

sterling qualities,
there is nothing so contagious
as pure openness of heart.

Nicholas Nickleby.

There is not an angel added to the Host

of Heaven but does its
blessed work on earth in those that
loved it here.

Old Curiosity Shop.

There is a providence in everything;

everything works for the best.

Dombey and Son.

A man never knows what he can do till

he tries.

Pickwick Papers.
 Eleventh Day.

Worldly goods are divided unequally,

and man must not repine.

Bleak House.

Do as you would be
done by!
Forget and forgive!

Battle of Life.
But for some trouble and
sorrow we should
never know half the good
there is about us.

Haunted Man.

Gallantry in its true sense

is supposed to
enoble and dignify a man.

Martin Chuzzlewit.
 Twelfth Day.

e should all try to discharge

our duty.

Pickwick Papers.

Unless we learn to do our duty to those

in our employ, they
will never learn to do their duty to us.

David Copperfield.

Simplicity and plainness are the soul

of elegance.

Old Curiosity Shop.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its

lights are stronger in contrast.

Pickwick Papers.

There is always something to be thankful for.

Little Dorrit.
 Thirteenth Day.

We all have some bright day—many of us,

let us hope, among a crowd of others,—
to which we revert with particular delight.

Nicholas Nickleby.

Be forever grateful unto all friends. Especially

unto them which brought you up by hand.

Mr. Pumblechook.

Dignity and even holiness too, sometimes,

are more questions
of coat and waist coat
than some
people imagine.

Oliver Twist.
 Fourteenth Day.

ice takes up her abode in many

temples, and who can
say that a fair outside shall not
enshrine her?

Dr. Losberne.

Without strong affection and humanity of

heart and gratitude to that
Being whose code is Mercy, and whose great
attribute is Benevolence to all things
that breathe,
happiness can never be attained.

Dickens.

Unchanging love and truth will carry

us through all.

Dickens.

Don’t try the feelings of any.

Martin Chuzzlewit.
 Fifteenth Day.

here is a great end to gain,

and that I keep before me.

Old Curiosity Shop.

If your destiny leads you into public life

and public station, you
must expect to be subjected to temptations
which other people is free from.

Pickwick Papers.

There is no substitute for thorough-going

ardent, and sincere earnestness.

David Copperfield.

If our inclinations are but good and open-hearted,

let us gratify them
boldly, though they bring upon us loss
instead of profit.

Martin Chuzzlewit.
 Sixteenth Day.

There is no royal road to learning, and what

is life but learning.

Our Mutual Friend.

Anxious people often magnify an evil and

make it worse.

Old Curiosity Shop.

Try not to associate

 bodily defects with
mental, my good friend,
except for a solid reason.

David Copperfield.

What we have to do is to turn our faces in our

new direction, and keep straight on.

Our Mutual Friend.

Be careful to develope your talents.

A Tale of Two Cities.

 Seventeenth Day.

othing is past hope.

Christmas Carol.

There is scarcely a sin in the world

that is in my eyes such a crying one
as ingratitude.

Tom Pinch.

Truth and honesty, like precious stones,

are perhaps
most easily imitated at a distance.

Nicholas Nickleby.

Life is made of ever so many partings

welded together.

Great Expectations.

The best among us need deal lightly

with faults.

Dickens.
 Eighteenth Day.

Monarchs imagine
attractions in the
lives of beggars.

Dombey and Son.

No man who was not a true gentleman

at heart ever was, since the
world began, a true gentleman in manner.

Great Expectations.

All happiness has an end—hence the chief

pleasure of its next beginning.
 Old Curiosity Shop.

You should feel the Dignity of Labour.

The Chimes.

Nature often enshrines

gallant and noble
hearts in weak bosoms.

Old Curiosity Shop.

 Nineteenth Day.

t is the duty of a man to be just

before he is generous.

Martin Chuzzlewit.

It is difficult to offer aid to an independent

man.

Barnaby Rudge.

Go in and win—an admirable thing to recommend

if you only know how to do it.

Pickwick.

Dishonesty will stare honesty out of

countenance any day in the week, if there is
anything to be got by it.

Hunted Down.

The world is prone to misconstruction.

Dombey and Son.

 Twentieth Day.

here never were greed and

cunning in the world yet, that
did not do too much
and overreach themselves.

David Copperfield.

Be diligent, work for a steady independence,

and be happy.

Dombey and Son.

It is not on earth that Heaven’s justice ends.

Old Curiosity Shop.

Women, after all, are the great props

and comforts of our existence.

Pickwick Papers.

Self-praise is no recommendation.

Bleak House.
Twenty-first Day.

Every failure teaches

a man something,
if he will learn.

Little Dorrit.

Mystery and disappointment

are not
absolutely
indispensable to the
 growth of love,
but they are often very
powerful auxiliaries.

Nicholas Nickleby.

The envious man beholds

his neighbor’s
honours even in the sky.

Barnaby Rudge.

A man can’t at all times be quite master

of himself.

Christmas Stories.
 Twenty-second Day.

ay every blessing that a true and

earnest heart can call
down from the source of
all truth and sincerity cheer and
prosper you.

Oliver Twist.

God bless home once more, and all

belonging to it.

Haunted Man.

Perhaps it’s a good thing to have an unsound

hobby ridden to death.

David Copperfield.

Be as rich as you honestly can. It’s your

duty. Not for your
sake, but for the sake of others.

Little Dorrit.
 Twenty-third Day.

Who that has a heart fails to

recognize the
silent presence of another?

Barnaby Rudge.

Father Time is not always a

hard parent, and
though he tarries for none of
his children,