of an
"internal sense," apart from cognitions of morality; and in such a
case, of course, the good and evil in question would be absolute; that
is to say, they would be bound up with life itself and not with
acquired social habits. We always speak of a "voice of conscience"
which teaches us from within to distinguish the two things: good
confers serenity, which is order; enthusiasm, which is strength; evil
is signalized as an anguish which is at times unbearable: remorse,
which is not only darkness and disorder, but fever, a malady of the
soul. It is certain that the laws of society, public opinion, material
well-being, and threats of peril would all be powerless to produce
these various sensations. Often serenity is to be found among the
unfortunate, whereas the remorse of Lady Macbeth, who saw the spot of
blood upon her hand, gnawed at the heart of one who had acquired a
kingdom.

It is not surprising that there should be an internal sensation which
warns us of perils, and causes us to recognize the circumstances
favorable to life. If science in these days demonstrates that the
means for preserving even material life correspond to the moral
"virtues," we may conclude that we shall be able to divine what is
necessary to life by means of the internal sensibility. Have not the
biological sciences demonstrated an analogous fact? The biometer
applied to man has made it possible to reconstruct the absolutely
average man, that is to say, the man whose body gives average
measurements in every part; and these average measurements have been
found, by means of the statistical and morphological studies of
medicine, to correspond to "normality." Thus the average man would be
a man so perfectly constructed that he has no morphological
predisposition to disease of the organs. When the figure of a man was
reconstructed in accordance with average biometrical proportions, it
was found to correspond in a remarkable manner to the proportions of
Greek statues. This fact helped to give a new interpretation to
"aesthetic sentiment." It was evidently by means of aesthetic feeling
that the eye of the Greek artist was able to extract the average
measurement of every organ, and to construct a marvelous and exact
whole therewith. The "enjoyment" of the artist was his enjoyment of
the "beautiful"; but he felt even more profoundly that which contained
the triumph of life, and distinguished it from the errors of nature,
which predispose to illne