Every idea
which is formed in the human mind, every activity and emotion,
has some relation, direct or indirect, to pain and pleasure. If, as is
the case in all the more important instances, these fluid activities
and emotions precipitate, as it were, in their evanescence certain
psychical solids called ideas of things, then the concomitant
pleasures are incorporated more or less in those concrete ideas and
the things acquire an aesthetic colouring. And although this
aesthetic colouring may be the last quality we notice in objects of
practical interest, its influence upon us is none the less real, and
often accounts for a great deal in our moral and practical attitude.

In the leading political and moral idea of our time, in the idea of
democracy, I think there is a strong aesthetic ingredient, and the
power of the idea of democracy over the imagination is an
illustration of that effect of multiplicity in uniformity which we
have been studying. Of course, nothing could be more absurd than
to suggest that the French Revolution, with its immense
implications, had an aesthetic preference for its basis; it sprang, as
we know, from the hatred of oppression, the rivalry of classes, and
the aspiration after a freer social and strictly moral organization.
But when these moral forces were suggesting and partly realizing
the democratic idea, this idea was necessarily vividly present to
men's thoughts; the picture of human life which it presented was
becoming familiar, and was being made the sanction and goal of
constant endeavour. Nothing so much enhances a good as to make
sacrifices for it. The consequence was that democracy, prized at
first as a means to happiness and as an instrument of good
government, was acquiring an intrinsic value; it was beginning to
seem good in itself, in fact, the only intrinsically right and perfect
arrangement. A utilitarian scheme was receiving an aesthetic
consecration. That which was happening to democracy had
happened before to the feudal and royalist systems; they too had
come to be prized in themselves, for the pleasure men took in
thinking of society organized in such an ancient, and thereby to
their fancy, appropriate and beautiful manner. The practical value
of the arrangement, on which, of course, it is entirely dependent for
its origin and authority, was forgotten, and men were ready to
sacrifice their welfare to their sense of propriety; that is, they
allowed an aesthetic good to outwe