igh a practical one. That seems
now a superstition, although, indeed, a very natural and even noble
one. Equally natural and noble, but no less superstitious, is our
own belief in the divine right of democracy. Its essential right is
something purely aesthetic.

Such aesthetic love of uniformity, however, is usually disguised
under some moral label: we call it the lore of justice, perhaps
because we have not considered that the value of justice also, in so
far as it is not derivative and utilitarian, must be intrinsic, or, what
is practically the same thing, aesthetic. But occasionally the
beauties of democracy are presented to us undisguised. The
writings of Walt Whitman are a notable example. Never, perhaps,
has the charm of uniformity in multiplicity been felt so completely
and so exclusively. Everywhere it greets us with a passionate
preference; not flowers but leaves of grass, not music but
drum-taps, not composition but aggregation, not the hero but the average
man, not the crisis but the vulgarest moment; and by this resolute
marshalling of nullities, by this effort to show us everything as a
momentary pulsation of a liquid and structureless whole, he
profoundly stirs the imagination. We may wish to dislike this
power, but, I think, we must inwardly admire it. For whatever
practical dangers we may see in this terrible levelling, our aesthetic
faculty can condemn no actual effect; its privilege is to be pleased
by opposites, and to be capable of finding chaos sublime without
ceasing to make nature beautiful.

_Values of types and values of examples._

Sec. 28. It is time we should return to the consideration of abstract
forms. Nearest in nature to the example of uniformity in
multiplicity, we found those objects, like a reversible pattern, that
having some variety of parts invite us to survey them in different
orders, and so bring into play in a marked manner the faculty of
apperception.

There is in the senses, as we have seen, a certain form of
stimulation, a certain measure and rhythm of waves with which the
aesthetic value of the sensation is connected. So when, in the
perception of the object, a notable contribution is made by memory
and mental habit, the value of the perception will be due, not only
to the pleasantness of the external stimulus, but also to the
pleasantness of the apperceptive reaction; and the latter source of
value will be more important in proportion as the object perceived
is more