ong as the absolute is enclosed in the limits of time, and the ideas of
reason have to be realized in humanity. For example, the intellectual
man has the ideal of virtue, of truth, and of happiness; but the active
man will only practise virtues, will only grasp truths, and enjoy happy
days. The business of physical and moral education is to bring back this
multiplicity to unity, to put morality in the place of manners, science
in the place of knowledge; the business of aesthetic education is to make
out of beauties the beautiful.

Energetic beauty can no more preserve a man from a certain residue of
savage violence and harshness than graceful beauty can secure him against
a certain degree of effeminacy and weakness. As it is the effect of the
energetic beauty to elevate the mind in a physical and moral point of
view and to augment its momentum, it only too often happens that the
resistance of the temperament and of the character diminishes the
aptitude to receive impressions, that the delicate part of humanity
suffers an oppression which ought only to affect its grosser part, and
that this coarse nature participates in an increase of force that ought
only to turn to the account of free personality. It is for this reason
that, at the periods when we find much strength and abundant sap in
humanity, true greatness of thought is seen associated with what is
gigantic and extravagant, and the sublimest feeling is found coupled with
the most horrible excess of passion. It is also the reason why, in the
periods distinguished for regularity and form, nature is as often
oppressed as it is governed, as often outraged as it is surpassed. And
as the action of gentle and graceful beauty is to relax the mind in the
moral sphere as well as the physical, it happens quite as easily that the
energy of feelings is extinguished with the violence of desires, and that
character shares in the loss of strength which ought only to affect the
passions. This is the reason why, in ages assumed to be refined, it is
not a rare thing to see gentleness degenerate into effeminacy, politeness
into platitude, correctness into empty sterility, liberal ways into
arbitrary caprice, ease into frivolity, calm into apathy, and, lastly, a
most miserable caricature treads on the heels of the noblest, the most
beautiful type of humanity. Gentle and graceful beauty is therefore a
want to the man who suffers the constraint of manner and of forms, for he
is moved by g