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of a self-sustaining order and a self-sufficing harmony among all those
faculties and parts and energies of universal life, which come within
the idealising range of art. In other words, the characteristically
modern inspiration is the inspiration of law. The regulated play of
forces shows itself as fit to stir those profound emotional impulses
which wake the artistic soul, as ever did the gracious or terrible gods
of antique or middle times. There are glories in Turner's idealisation
of the energies of matter, which are at least as nobly imaginative and
elevated, in spite of the conspicuous absence of the human element in
them, as the highest products of the artists who believed that their
work was for the service and honour of a deity.

It is as mistaken to suppose that this conviction of the supremacy of a
cold and self-sustained order in the universe is fatal to emotional
expansion, as it would be to suppose it fatal to intellectual curiosity.
Experience has shown in the scientific sphere, that the gradual
withdrawal of natural operations from the grasp of the imaginary
volitions of imaginary beings has not tamed, but greatly stimulated and
fertilised scientific curiosity as to the conditions of these
operations. Why should it be otherwise in the aesthetic sphere? Why
should all that part of our mental composition which responds to the
beautiful and imaginative expression of real truths, be at once inflamed
and satisfied by the thought that our whole lives, and all the movements
of the universe, are the objects of the inexplicable caprice of Makers
who are also Destroyers, and yet grow cold, apathetic, and unproductive,
in the shadow of the belief that we can only know ourselves as part of
the stupendous and inexorable succession of phenomenal conditions,
moving according to laws that may be formulated positively, but not
interpreted morally, to new destinies that are eternally unfathomable?
Why should this conception of a coherent order, free from the arbitrary
and presumptuous stamp of certain final causes, be less favourable,
either to the ethical or the aesthetic side of human nature, than the
older conception of the regulation of the course of the great series by
a multitude of intrinsically meaningless and purposeless volitions? The
alertness of our sensations for all sources of outer beauty remains
unimpaired. The old and lovely attitude of devout service does not pass
away to leave vacancy, but is transfor