ve something of
finality or perfection about them, and themselves partake, in a
measure, of the more excellent nature of ends--that the means should
justify the end.

With this view he would demand culture, paideia,+ as the Cyrenaics
said, or, in other words, a wide, a complete, education--an education
partly negative, as ascertaining the true limits of man's capacities,
but for the most part positive, and directed especially to the
expansion and refinement of the power of reception; of those powers,
above all, which are immediately relative to fleeting phenomena, the
powers of emotion and sense. In such an education, an "aesthetic"
education, as it might now be termed, and certainly occupied very
largely with those aspects of things which affect us pleasurably
through sensation, art, of course, including all the finer sorts of
literature, would have a great part to play. The study of music, in
that wider Platonic sense, according to which, music comprehends all
those matters over which the Muses of Greek mythology preside, would
conduct one to an exquisite appreciation of all the finer traits of
nature and of man. Nay! the products of the imagination must
themselves be held to present the most perfect forms of life--spirit
and matter alike under their purest and most perfect conditions--the
most strictly appropriate [148] objects of that impassioned
contemplation, which, in the world of intellectual discipline, as in
the highest forms of morality and religion, must be held to be the
essential function of the "perfect." Such manner of life might come
even to seem a kind of religion--an inward, visionary, mystic piety, or
religion, by virtue of its effort to live days "lovely and pleasant" in
themselves, here and now, and with an all-sufficiency of well-being in
the immediate sense of the object contemplated, independently of any
faith, or hope that might be entertained as to their ulterior tendency.
In this way, the true aesthetic culture would be realisable as a new
form of the contemplative life, founding its claim on the intrinsic
"blessedness" of "vision"--the vision of perfect men and things. One's
human nature, indeed, would fain reckon on an assured and endless
future, pleasing itself with the dream of a final home, to be attained
at some still remote date, yet with a conscious, delightful home-coming
at last, as depicted in many an old poetic Elysium. On the other hand,
the world of perfected sensation, i