them that worth can ultimately be determined.

Values spring from the immediate and inexplicable reaction of
vital impulse, and from the irrational part of our nature. The
rational part is by its essence relative; it leads us from data to
conclusions, or from parts to wholes; it never furnishes the data
with which it works. If any preference or precept were declared to
be ultimate and primitive, it would thereby be declared to be
irrational, since mediation, inference, and synthesis are the essence
of rationality. The ideal of rationality is itself as arbitrary, as much
dependent on the needs of a finite organization, as any other ideal.
Only as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which the
philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In
spite of the verbal propriety of saying that reason demands
rationality, what really demands rationality, what makes it a good
and indispensable thing and gives it all its authority, is not its own
nature, but our need of it both in safe and economical action and in
the pleasures of comprehension.

It is evident that beauty is a species of value, and what we have
said of value in general applies to this particular kind. A first
approach to a definition of beauty has therefore been made by the
exclusion of all intellectual judgments, all judgments of matter of
fact or of relation. To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of
value, is a sign of a pedantic and borrowed criticism. If we
approach a work of art or nature scientifically, for the sake of its
historical connexions or proper classification, we do not approach
it aesthetically. The discovery of its date or of its author may be
otherwise interesting; it only remotely affects our aesthetic
appreciation by adding to the direct effect certain associations. If
the direct effect were absent, and the object in itself uninteresting,
the circumstances would be immaterial. Moliere's _Misanthrope_
says to the court poet who commends his sonnet as written in a
quarter of an hour,

Voyons, monsieur, le temps ne fait rien a l'affaire,

and so we might say to the critic that sinks into the archaeologist,
show us the work, and let the date alone.

In an opposite direction the same substitution of facts for values
makes its appearance, whenever the reproduction of fact is made
the sole standard of artistic excellence. Many half-trained
observers condemn the work of some naive or fanciful masters
with a sn