t be remembered,
consists the value, the necessity of the abstract and the ideal. In the
long history of evolution we have now reached the stage where selection
is no longer in the mere hands of unconscious nature, but of conscious
or half-conscious man; who makes himself, or is made by mankind,
according to not merely physical necessities, but to the intellectual
necessity of realizing the ideal, of pursuing the object, of imitating
the model, before him. No man will ever find the living counterpart of
that chryselephantine goddess of the Greeks; ivory and gold, nay,
marble, fashioned by an artist, are one thing; flesh is another, and
flesh fashioned by mere blind accident. But the man who should have
beheld that Phidian goddess, who should have felt her full perfection,
would not have been as easily satisfied as any other with a mere
commonplace living woman; he would have sought--and seeking, would have
had more likelihood of finding--the woman of flesh and blood who nearest
approached to that ivory and gold perfection. The case is similar with
the "Vita Nuova." No earthly affection, no natural love of man for
woman, of an entire human being, body and soul, for another entire human
being, can ever be the counterpart of this passion for Beatrice, the
passion of a mere mind for a mere mental ideal. But if the old
lust-fattened evil of the world is to diminish rather than to increase,
why then every love of man for woman and of woman for man should tend,
to the utmost possibility, to resemble that love of the "Vita Nuova."
For mankind has gradually separated from brute kind merely by the
development of those possibilities of intellectual and moral passion
which the animal has not got; an animal man will never cease to be, but
a man he can daily more and more become, until from the obscene
goat-legged and goat-faced creature which we commonly see, he has turned
into something like certain antique fauns: a beautiful creature, not
noticeably a beast, a beast in only the smallest portion of his nature.
In order that this may come to pass--and its coming to pass means, let
us remember, the enormous increase of happiness and diminution of misery
upon earth--it is necessary that day by day and year by year there
should enter into man's feelings, emotions, and habits, into his whole
life, a greater proportion of that which is his own, and is not shared
by the animal; that his actions, preferences, the great bulk of his
conscious