er to is a very subtle and complicated mood wherein the
simple sadistic impulse to derive sensual pleasure from the
contemplation of cruelty has been seized upon and taken
possession of by the emotion of malice.

The complicated mood resulting from this association of sadistic
cruelty with inert malice is perhaps the most powerful engine of
evil that exists in the world; although a pure unmitigated condition
of unsensualized, unimpassioned, motiveless malice is, in its
inmost self, more essentially and profoundly evil. For while the
energy of sadism renders the actual destructive power of malice
much more formidable, we must remember that what really
constitutes the essence of evil is never the energy of destruction
but always the malicious inertness of resistance to creation. We
have thus arrived at some measure of insight as to the nature of art
and we find that whatever else it may be it must be penetrated
through and through by the overcoming of malice by love. It must,
in other words, have the actual outflowing of the soul as the
instrument of its expression and as the psycho-material medium
with which it inscribes its vision upon the objective mystery that
confronts it.

We have at least arrived at this point in our search for a definite
criterion: that when in any work of art a vein of excessive cruelty
or, worse still, a vein of sneering and vindictive malice, dominates
the emotional atmosphere, such a work of art, however admirable
it may be in other respects, falls below the level of the most
excellent. The relation between the idea of beauty as expressed by
the aesthetic sense and those other ideas, namely of truth and
goodness, which complete the circle of human vision, is a relation
which may be suggested thus.

Since all three of these primordial ideas are unified by the emotion
of love it is clear that the emotion of love is the element in which
each of them severally moves. And since it is impossible that love
should be antagonistic to itself we must conclude that the love
which is the element or substratum of beauty is the same love that
is the element or substratum of goodness and truth. And since all
these three elements are in reality one element, which is indeed
nothing less than the dominant outflowing of the soul itself, it
follows that those portions of the soul's outflowing which have
been directed by reason and by conscience, which we call the idea
of truth and the idea of goodness, must h