mass of ideas still obscure, indistinct, incomplete, have had strength sufficient—­or been forced, it may be—­to turn into facts, into gestures, into feelings and habits.  We do not imply by this that the other thoughts should be neglected.  Those that surround our actual life may perhaps be compared with an army besieging a city.  The city once taken, the bulk of the troops would probably not be permitted to pass through the gates.  Admission would be doubtless withheld from the irregular part of the army—­barbarians, mercenaries, all those, in a word, whose natural tendencies would lead them to drunkenness, pillage, or bloodshed.  And it might also very well happen that fully two-thirds of the troops would have taken no part in the final decisive battle.  But there often is value in forces that appear to be useless; and the city would evidently not have yielded to panic and thrown open her gates, had the well-disciplined force at the foot of the walls not been flanked by the hordes in the valley.  So is it in moral life, too.  Those thoughts are not wholly vain that have been unable to touch our actual life; they have helped on, supported, the others; yet is it these others alone that have fully accomplished their mission And therefore does it behove us to have in our service, drawn up in front of the crowded ranks of our sad and bewildered thoughts, a group of ideas more human and confident, ready at all times to penetrate vigorously into life.

61.  Even when our endeavour to emerge from reality is due to the purest desire for immaterial good, one gesture must still be worth more than a thousand intentions; nor is this that intentions are valueless, but that the least gesture of goodness, or courage, or justice, makes demands upon us far greater than a thousand lofty intentions.  Chiromantists pretend that the whole of our life is engraved on our palm; our life, according to them, being a certain number of actions which imprint ineffaceable marks on our flesh, before or after fulfilment; whereas not a trace will be left by either thoughts or intentions.  If I have for many long days cherished projects of murder or treachery, heroism or sacrifice, my hand will tell nothing of these; but if I have killed some one—­ involuntarily perhaps, imagining he was about to attack me; or if I have rescued a child from the flames that enwrapped it—­my hand will bear, all my life, the infallible sign of love or of murder.  Chiromancy maybe delusion or not—­it matters but little; here we are concerned with the great moral truth that underlies this distinction.  The place that I fill in the universe will never be changed by my thought; I shall be as I was to the day of my death; but my actions will almost invariably move me forwards or backwards in the hierarchy of man.  Thought is a solitary, wandering, fugitive force, which advances towards us today and perhaps on the morrow will vanish, whereas every deed presupposes a permanent army of ideas and desires which have, after lengthy effort, secured foot-hold in reality.