e business is not to delight. But the sudden inundation
of science and sentiment which has made the mind of the
nineteenth century so confused, by overloading us with materials
and breaking up our habits of apperception and our ideals, has led
to an exclusive sense of the value of expressiveness, until this has
been almost identified with beauty. This exaggeration can best
prove how the expression of truth may enter into the play of
aesthetic forces, and give a value to representations which, but for
it, would be repulsive.

_The liberation of self._

Sec. 59. Hitherto we have been considering those elements of a
pathetic presentation which may mitigate our sympathetic emotion,
and make it on the whole agreeable. These consist in the intrinsic
beauties of the medium of presentation, and in the concomitant
manifestation of various goods, notably of truth. The mixture of
these values is perhaps all we have in mildly pathetic works, in the
presence of which we are tolerably aware of a sort of balance and
compensation of emotions. The sorrow and the beauty, the
hopelessness and the consolation, mingle and merge into a kind of
joy which has its poignancy, indeed, but which is far too passive
and penitential to contain the louder and sublimer of our tragic
moods. In these there is a wholeness, a strength, and a rapture,
which still demands an explanation.

Where this explanation is to be found may be guessed from the
following circumstance. The pathetic is a quality of the object, at
once lovable and sad, which we accept and allow to flow in upon
the soul; but the heroic is an attitude of the will, by which the
voices of the outer world are silenced, and a moral energy, flowing
from within, is made to triumph over them. If we fail, therefore, to
discover, by analysis of the object, anything which could make it
sublime, we must not be surprised at our failure. We must
remember that the object is always but a portion of our
consciousness: that portion which has enough coherence and
articulation to be recognized as permanent and projected into the
outer world. But consciousness remains one, in spite of this
diversification of its content, and the object is not really
independent, but is in constant relation to the rest of the mind, in
the midst of which it swims like a bubble on a dark surface of
water.

The aesthetic effect of objects is always due to the total emotional
value of the consciousness in which they exist. We