instinctive belief in her pleasure in it. For this reason the
circumstances expressive of happiness are not those that are
favourable to it in reality, but those that are congruous with it in
idea. The green of spring, the bloom of youth, the variability of
childhood, the splendour of wealth and beauty, all these are
symbols of happiness, not because they have been known to
accompany it in fact, -- for they do not, any more than their
opposites, -- but because they produce an image and echo of it in
us aesthetically. We believe those things to be happy which it
makes us happy to think of or to see; the belief in the blessedness
of the supreme being itself has no other foundation. Our joy in the
thought of omniscience makes us attribute joy to the possession of
it, which it would in fact perhaps be very far from involving or
even allowing.

The expressiveness of forms has a value as a sign of the life that
actually inhabits those forms only when they resemble our own
body; it is then probable that similar conditions of body involve, in
them and in us, similar emotions; and we should not long continue
to regard as the expression of pleasure an attitude that we know, by
experience in our own person, to accompany pain. Children,
indeed, may innocently torture animals, not having enough sense
of analogy to be stopped by the painful suggestions of their
writhings; and, although in a rough way we soon correct these
crying misinterpretations by a better classification of experience,
we nevertheless remain essentially subject to the same error. We
cannot escape it, because the method which involves it is the only
one that justifies belief in objective consciousness at all. Analogy
of bodies helps us to distribute and classify the life we conceive
about us; but what leads us to conceive it is the direct association
of our own feeling with images of things, an association which
precedes any clear representation of our own gestures and attitude.
I know that smiles mean pleasure before I have caught myself
smiling in the glass; they mean pleasure because they give it.

Since these aesthetic effects include some of the most moving and
profound beauties, philosophers have not been slow to turn the
unanalyzed paradox of their formation into a principle, and to
explain by it the presence and necessity of evil. As in the tragic and
the sublime, they have thought, the sufferings and dangers to
which a hero is exposed seem to add to his