oul is like a pure state of
body: a morbid craving is like a disease; a noble moral attitude is like
a noble physical attitude: moral excellence and physical beauty are both
the healthy, the perfect; but they are the healthy, the perfect, in two
totally different halves of nature, and we perceive and judge them by
totally different organisms. Whence our moral instincts have come, or
how they ever entered into the scheme of a world in which there is so
much to shock them; how the preference for the good of others was ever
evolved out of the preference for the good of self is a question most
speedily solved by the men of science who seek the reasons why Christ is
good and the thinned gold-leaved poplars by the river are beautiful, in
the living nerves of ripped-up beasts; this much is evident that moral
instinct judges that part of actions which is neither to be felt with
our hands, nor to be seen with our eyes, nor to be tasted or heard or
smelt: it judges and finds good or evil certain qualities or combinations
of qualities which do not materially exist: things which though they
have as real an existence as anything which can be tasted or sniffed or
fingered, have yet a purely intellectual existence, can be found only by
those mysterious senses which, even as touch and hearing, and smell and
taste and sight, put us in communication with the physical world outside
us, put us far more wonderfully in communication with the moral world
within us. The qualities constituting physical beauty, on the other
hand, are, to a large extent at least, perceived by our physical senses:
there is indeed a point where the mere nerve sensations no longer serve
to explain aesthetical likings or dislikings, where, on the other hand,
the addition of mere logical considerations of fitness seem insufficient
to account for phenomena, where, in short, we are forced to have
recourse to a very confused and at present untenable idea of inherited
habits and love of proportion, but it nevertheless remains evident that
physical beauty is a thing perceived through the physical senses and
concretely extant in the world around us. We say that a character is
morally good because certain actions or words reveal to us the existence
of certain tendencies and habits of feeling which (no matter how
instituted) satisfy and delight our moral nature, because there is
between these tendencies of feeling and our moral nature a mysterious
affinity, which may depend on