to constitute unalloyed happiness. The
satisfaction of the passions and the appetites, in which we chiefly
place earthly happiness, themselves take on an aesthetic tinge
when we remove ideally the possibility of loss or variation. What
could the Olympians honour in one another or the seraphim
worship in God except the embodiment of eternal attributes, of
essences which, like beauty, make us happy only in contemplation?
The glory of heaven could not be otherwise symbolized than by
light and music. Even the knowledge of truth, which the most
sober theologians made the essence of the beatific vision, is an
aesthetic delight; for when the truth has no further practical utility,
it becomes a landscape. The delight of it is imaginative and the
value of it aesthetic.

This reduction of all values to immediate appreciations, to
sensuous or vital activities, is so inevitable that it has struck even
the minds most courageously rationalistic. Only for them, instead
of leading to the liberation of aesthetic goods from practical
entanglements and their establishment as the only pure and
positive values in life, this analysis has led rather to the denial of
all pure and positive goods altogether. Such thinkers naturally
assume that moral values are intrinsic and supreme; and since these
moral values would not arise but for the existence or imminence of
physical evils, they embrace the paradox that without evil no good
whatever is conceivable.

The harsh requirements of apologetics have no doubt helped them
to this position, from which one breath of spring or the sight of one
well-begotten creature should be enough to dislodge them. Their
ethical temper and the fetters of their imagination forbid them to
reconsider their original assumption and to conceive that morality
is a means and not an end; that it is the price of human
non-adaptation, and the consequence of the original sin of unfitness. It
is the compression of human conduct within the narrow limits of
the safe and possible. Remove danger, remove pain, remove the
occasion of pity, and the need of morality is gone. To say "thou
shalt not" would then be an impertinence.

But this elimination of precept would not be a cessation of life.
The senses would still be open, the instincts would still operate,
and lead all creatures to the haunts and occupations that befitted
them. The variety of nature and the infinity of art, with the
companionship of our fellows, would fill the l