both conscience and reason are continually being applied to
action, to conduct, to the manipulation of practical affairs, and are
bound in this commerce with superficial circumstance to grow a
little blunt and gross and to lose something of their fine edge.

Conscience and reason, in the hurly-burly and pell-mell of life, are
driven to compromise, to half-measures, to the second-best.

Conscience is compelled to be satisfied with something less than
its own rigid demands. Reason is compelled to accept something
less than its own rigid demands. Both of these things tend
to become, under the pressure of the play of circumstance,
pragmatical, time-serving, and opportunist. But the aesthetic
sense, although in itself it has always room for infinite growth, is
in its inherent nature unable to compromise; unable to bend this
way and that; unable to dally with half-measures.

Any action, in a world of this kind, necessarily implies
compromise; and since goodness is so largely a matter of action,
goodness is necessarily penetrated by a spirit of compromise.
Indeed it may be said that a certain measure of common-sense is
of the very essence of goodness. But what has common-sense to
do with art? Common-sense has never been able, and never will be
able, to understand even the rudiments of art. For art is the
half-discovery of something that must always seem an impossibility to
common-sense; and it is the half-creation of something that must
always render common-sense irrelevant and unimportant. Truth,
again, in a world of so infinite a complication, must frequently
have to remain an open question, a suspended judgment, an
antinomy of opposites. The agnostic attitude--as, for instance, in
the matter of the immortality of the soul--may in certain cases
come to be the ultimate gesture of what we call the truth.

But with the aesthetic sense there can never be any suspension of
judgment, never any open question, never any antinomy of
opposites, never the least shadow of the pragmatic, or "working"
test. It is therefore natural enough that when persons possessed of
any degree of cultivated taste hear other persons speak of
"goodness" or "truth" they grow distrustful and suspicious, they
feel uneasy and very much on guard. For they know well that the
conscience of the ordinary person is but a blunt and clumsy
instrument, quite as likely to distort and pervert the essential spirit
of "goodness" as to reveal it, and they know well t