taneity of our
pleasures is what is most essential to them.

The sad business of life is rather to escape certain dreadful evils to
which our nature exposes us, -- death, hunger, disease, weariness,
isolation, and contempt. By the awful authority of these things,
which stand like spectres behind every moral injunction,
conscience in reality speaks, and a mind which they have duly
impressed cannot but feel, by contrast, the hopeless triviality of the
search for pleasure. It cannot but feel that a life abandoned to
amusement and to changing impulses must run unawares into fatal
dangers. The moment, however, that society emerges from the
early pressure of the environment and is tolerably secure against
primary evils, morality grows lax. The forms that life will farther
assume are not to be imposed by moral authority, but are
determined by the genius of the race, the opportunities of the
moment, and the tastes and resources of individual minds. The
reign of duty gives place to the reign of freedom, and the law and
the covenant to the dispensation of grace.

The appreciation of beauty and its embodiment in the arts are
activities which belong to our holiday life, when we are redeemed
for the moment from the shadow of evil and the slavery to fear,
and are following the bent of our nature where it chooses to lead us.
The values, then, with which we here deal are positive; they were
negative in the sphere of morality. The ugly is hardly an exception,
because it is not the cause of any real pain. In itself it is rather a
source of amusement. If its suggestions are vitally repulsive, its
presence becomes a real evil towards which we assume a practical
and moral attitude. And, correspondingly, the pleasant is never, as
we hare seen, the object of a truly moral injunction.

_Work and play._

Sec. 4. We have here, then, an important element of the distinction
between aesthetic and moral values. It is the same that has been
pointed to in the famous contrast between work and play. These
terms may be used in different senses and their importance in
moral classification differs with the meaning attached to them. We
may call everything play which is useless activity, exercise that
springs from the physiological impulse to discharge the energy
which the exigencies of life have not called out. Work will then be
all action that is necessary or useful for life. Evidently if work and
play are thus objectively distinguished as useful and