d worthy of expression. Art exists and has value by its
adaptation to these universal conditions of beauty.

Nothing but the good of life enters into the texture of the beautiful.
What charms us in the comic, what stirs us in the sublime and
touches us in the pathetic, is a glimpse of some good; imperfection
has value only as an incipient perfection. Could the labours and
sufferings of life be reduced, and a better harmony between man
and nature be established, nothing would be lost to the arts; for the
pure and ultimate value of the comic is discovery, of the pathetic,
love, of the sublime, exaltation; and these would still subsist.
Indeed, they would all be increased; and it has ever been,
accordingly, in the happiest and most prosperous moments of
humanity, when the mind and the world were knit into a brief
embrace, that natural beauty has been best perceived, and art has
won its triumphs. But it sometimes happens, in moments less
propitious, that the soul is subdued to what it works in, and loses
its power of idealization and hope. By a pathetic and superstitious
self-depreciation, we then punish ourselves for the imperfection of
nature. Awed by the magnitude of a reality that we can no longer
conceive as free from evil, we try to assert that its evil also is a
good; and we poison the very essence of the good to make its
extension universal. We confuse the causal connexion of those
things in nature which we call good or evil by an adventitious
denomination with the logical opposition between good and evil
themselves; because one generation makes room for another, we
say death is necessary to life; and because the causes of sorrow and
joy are so mingled in this world, we cannot conceive how, in a
better world, they might be disentangled.

This incapacity of the imagination to reconstruct the conditions of
life and build the frame of things nearer to the heart's desire is
dangerous to a steady loyalty to what is noble and fine. We
surrender ourselves to a kind of miscellaneous appreciation,
without standard or goal; and calling every vexatious apparition by
the name of beauty, we become incapable of discriminating its
excellence or feeling its value. We need to clarify our ideals, and
enliven our vision of perfection. No atheism is so terrible as the
absence of an ultimate ideal, nor could any failure of power be
more contrary to human nature than the failure of moral
imagination, or more incompatible with healthy