THE VALUE OF ILLUSIONS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 8 January 1931, Page 8

THE VALUE OF ILLUSIONS

A recent cable reported that the French courts will shortly have to estimate the legal value of an illusion. It appears that a professor informed an eight-year-old boy that “Father Christmas” was an invention and that Ids parents placed presents in his stocking, '/’he boy’s father is claiming £BO as moral damages on the ground that he desired his son to continue to hold the illusion. Longfellow says “Trust to thy heart, and what the world calls illusions.” Half, if not all, of our ghost stories arise from illusion, but they have a fascination many of us would miss if they were explained away by rationalist critics. Most people (writes W.-M. in the Auckland “Star”) have family ghosts in whom they more than half believe, and nearly everyone lias a tale of some dream, difficult to be interpreted, and foreboding good or evil to some member of the house. In Ireland certain great families have a Banshee which sits and wails ail night, when the head of the family is about to die. In England many families rt*. tain a ghost which walks up and down a terrace, and in Scotland there are prophetic shepherd? who on some misty mountain top at eventide peer into the twilight and see funerals pass by, portending the decease of some neighbour. But beyond these there are illusions from which we would not willingly he awakened. The sick man in Horace, who fancied he was always sitting at a play, rightly complained when his friends roused him from his hallucination. “We rightly,” says Emerson, “accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions.” Faith in man or woman is by some regarded as an illusion. But happy, thrice happy, are they who believe in honour, friendship, goodness, virtue, gratitude. Sad indeed is the man who has become disillusioned and has lost all his youthful ideals. He is melancholy, suspicious, incredulous. Happier by far is he who sits crowned with the flowers of illusion and who still remains a charmed listener to the songs which pleased his youth, trusting “his heart and what the world calls illusions.”