actions, we are not less likely to act morally, and we are much more likely not to act foolishly. It seems to me that this has a practical bearing on social morality. The great danger, in this country at all events, is that we are so prone to be guided by sentiment and wilfulness instead of by reason. We may be told that this is a penalty that must be paid for popular government, since the masses will always be swayed by their emotions and desires, and never by their intellect. To this we can only answer that, if so, we are likely to find that we have paid too high a price for a political theory.

I should also like to remind the Voluntarists that desire, even more than speculative thought, is never for its own continuance, but always for its own satisfaction and consequent cessation. Unless, therefore, the will is eternally self-stultifying, eternally and necessarily disappointed— which is the creed of Pessimism-the heaven of the will is always static in respect of its present object. In other words, the will, in seeking its own fulfilment, seeks to pass into that higher sphere where it cannot remain will pure and simple, but must pass into some higher mode of activity.

The danger of Intellectualism, as of other one-sided ideas of Faith, is that it tempts us to make a premature synthesis, perhaps leaving us in bondage to the lower categories of mechanism. There are very deep antinomies which we must accept as existing for our minds at present, though we know that they are not real or fundamental. We must take no short cuts to self-consistency by suppressing half the truth. God, for us, is both changing and unchanging, blessed and suffering, eternal and becoming. These are just the antitheses which, according to Plotinus, are transcended in the intelligible world, but not in the world of our common experience.

CHAPTER XII

THE ESTHETIC GROUND OF FAITH

BEAUTY is a quality which the Creator has impressed, in various degrees, upon nearly all His works; and the recognition of beauty is a faculty with which very many conscious creatures are endowed. We are often surprised at the symmetry and beauty which appear in the constructions of animals-for example, in the nests of birds and the honeycombs of bees; and the sexual ornaments which many birds and beasts exhibit to win the favour of their mates prove both the important part which æsthetic taste plays in modifying species, and the delicate appreciation of beautiful forms and colours which makes these elaborate decorations necessary. Examples of ornaments which to our taste are grotesque, such as the bright colours of the male mandrill in the breeding-season, are so rare as to be negligible exceptions; far more significant is the exquisite sheen of the humming-bird's wing, or the glory of the peacock's tail. Nor is the æsthetic sense of the lower animals confined to form and colour. The song of the nightingale proves that some birds are no mean musicians; and even among insects, some spiders, we are told, have to please the female by an exhibition of elegant dancing. Moreover, inanimate nature is everywhere beautiful. Even decay and corruption, which in the animal world are repulsive, are beautiful in things without sentient life.

The view taken in these lectures is that Beauty is one of the fundamental attributes of God, which He has therefore impressed upon His world. I hold it to be a quality

residing in the objects, and not imparted to them by the observer. I hold Beauty to be, like Truth and Goodness, an end in itself, for God's creation. If so, it is right and natural for Faith to acknowledge beauty, and to strengthen itself by the contemplation and practice of the beautiful. To this view two objections may be made. First, it has been argued that our enjoyment of the beautiful is nothing more than a pleasant feeling arising from our perception of usefulness. For instance, the points of beauty in a human face and figure are all signs of health, strength, intelligence, and character. In the case of a woman, those lines are also thought beautiful which indicate that she is well suited for her special functions. But this theory does not fit the facts. Many of the animal decorations, to which we have just alluded, are apparently useless,' except to give pleasure by their form and colour. And the same impossibility of reducing the beautiful to the useful is apparent throughout human experience. Illustrations of this will occur to everybody. Beauty is clearly something sui generis. Secondly, we are told that the enjoyment of beauty is purely subjective. Not only does the beautiful object require a beholder, and one who has a seeing eye, but the beauty is in our own mind, and not in what we see. Now it would be a bold theory that the beauties of a play of Shakespeare are put there by us his commonplace readers. Is it not even more absurd to suppose that our minds create the beauty of a sunset, or of a glorious action in history? Again, if the appreciation of beauty is merely subjective, there is no appeal from individual taste. It is then an impertinence to speak of good or bad taste, for there is no standard to which taste can be referred. But no one can seriously maintain that the proverb De gustibus non est disputandum has any validity in the higher regions of art, of natural beauty, or of seemliness and propriety of conduct. Moreover, the strong protest of our own consciousness against theories of subjectivity ought to be

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given due weight. When we admire anything or anybody, we invariably believe that the qualities which we admire are really there, and if we find that we have been deceived, our admiration vanishes at once. All the objects we call beautiful,' says Reid, agree in two things, which seem to concur in our sense of beauty. First, when they are perceived or even imagined, they produce a certain agreeable emotion or feeling in the mind; and secondly, this agreeable emotion is accompanied with an opinion or belief of their having some perfection or excellence belonging to them.'1 The subjective and objective side are both necessary; but assuredly philosophy does not require us to refuse the name of beautiful to natural objects which man has never beheld.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.

Some have even found in this thought an argument for the existence of God, whose eye sees and enjoys what otherwise would be wasted for want of a beholder.

We may then, I think, assert the independence of the Beautiful as a revelation of the Eternal distinct from other revelations which come to us through science and the moral sense. And since Beauty is thus conceived to have an absolute value, the natural instinct of mankind has led us to connect Beauty with the object and mode of worship. Whatever men have thought most beautiful they have brought and offered to their gods. And since the religious instinct, in all its forms, finds satisfaction in creation and production more than in mere receptivity, art has from the first been consecrated to worship. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, and ritual are varying expressions of this tendency. The noblest works

1 Intellectual Powers, Essay viii. ; quoted by Caldecott, The Philosophy of Religion, p. 55.

of imaginative genius have been either partially or entirely inspired by religious Faith.

The spirit of worship is somewhat jealous of association with utility. Utility tends to cramp the free exercise of the creative imagination, and forces us to divide our attention between the universal and the particular. Thus religious cultus has always contained ceremonies which have no bearing on practical life, and within the sphere of ordinary conduct religion has usually issued some commands and prohibitions which have no rational sanction. Just because the spirit of worship rejects indignantly the limitation of its scope by pragmatic standards, it rejoices in acts which are a revolt against moralism and intellectualism alike. The aesthetic instinct is more independent of utilitarian considerations than the intellect, and far more than the moral sense. For this reason, in the form of poetical and religious imagination, it penetrates and illumines regions which are inaccessible to philosophy and ethics. And its reaction upon life has a distinctive quality, the loss of which cannot be made good from any other source. The mind that is dominated by perception of the beautiful, and by the love of it which can hardly be dissociated from this perception, will certainly carry its habit and its method into every part of life. Among a really artistic people we find a joyful desire to do everything well and appropriately. What has to be done is done imaginatively; what has to be spoken or made is spoken or made fittingly, lovingly, beautifully.' 1

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Some writers have seen in the Sublime' the link between æsthetical feeling and religion. Kant, in particular, quite forgetful of the limitations which in his Critique of Pure Reason he had laid upon all our faculties, invests the Sublime with a mystical power of uniting the human spirit with the infinite. 'We call that sublime which is absolutely great.' 'The sublime is that which cannot 1 Santayana, Reason in Art, p. 16.