Time & Perspective Quote by Samuel Alexander

Desire, for Alexander, is a kind of imaginative inflation machine: stall gratification and the mind starts adding interest. The delayed object stops being merely wanted and becomes story-rich, lacquered with “images of future fruition” that feel less like predictions than inevitabilities. That’s the sly mechanism in his wording. “Fancy” isn’t a cute embellishment; it’s an engine that manufactures value, “clothing” the object in traits it may never possess, but that the impulse requires in order to keep burning.

The intent is diagnostic. Alexander is mapping how appetite recruits imagination to justify itself, turning waiting into a workshop where expectation is fabricated. Notice the almost clinical syntax: “calculated to inflame.” Desire isn’t romantic spontaneity here; it’s a self-stoking system, rational in method even when irrational in content. The subtext is gently deflationary: the beloved object doesn’t seduce us so much as our mind pre-seduces itself on the object’s behalf. Delay is not neutral time; it’s an active ingredient that intensifies attachment by giving fantasy room to elaborate.

Context matters. Writing as a philosopher straddling Victorian moral psychology and early 20th-century realism about the mind, Alexander anticipates later accounts of projection and reward. He’s describing a familiar modern loop: the longer you wait for the job offer, the text back, the album drop, the purchase, the more your brain writes a trailer for a life you’ll finally get to live. When the real thing arrives, it’s not competing with reality; it’s competing with your best editor.