fecundating sky. Similarly it is a
common observation that while _unmusical_ Bayreuth-goers often
attribute demoralising effects to some of Wagner's music, the
genuinely musical listeners are unaware, and usually incredulous, of
any such evil possibilities.

This question of the purifying power of the Beautiful has brought us
back to our starting-point. It illustrates the distinction between
_contemplating an aspect_ and _thinking about things,_ and this
distinction's corollary that shape as such is yon-side of _real_ and
_unreal,_ taking on the character of reality and unreality only
inasmuch as it is thought of in connexion with a _thing._ As regards
the possibility of being _good_ or _evil,_ it is evident from all the
foregoing that _shape as shape,_ and without the suggestion of
things, can be evil only in the sense of being ugly, ugliness
diminishing its own drawbacks by being, _ipso facto,_ difficult to
dwell upon, inasmuch as it goes against the grain of our perceptive
and empathic activities. The contemplation of beautiful shape is, on
the other hand, favoured by its pleasurableness, and such
contemplation of beautiful shape lifts our perceptive and empathic
activities, that is to say a large part of our intellectual and emotional
life, on to a level which can only be spiritually, organically, and in
so far, morally beneficial.

CHAPTER XXI

CONCLUSION (EVOLUTIONAL)

SOME of my Readers, not satisfied by the answer implicit in the last
chapter and indeed in the whole of this little book, may ask a final
question concerning our subject. Not: What is the use of Art? since,
as we have seen, Art has many and various uses both to the
individual and to the community, each of which uses is independent
of the attainment of Beauty.

The remaining question concerns the usefulness of the very demand
for Beauty, of that _Aesthetic Imperative_ by which the other uses
of art are more or less qualified or dominated. In what way, the
Reader may ask, has sensitiveness to Beauty contributed to the
survival of mankind, that it should not only have been preserved and
established by evolutional selection, but invested with the
tremendous power of the pleasure and pain alternative?

The late William James, as some readers may remember, placed
musical pleasure between sentimental love and sea-sickness as
phenomena unaccountable by any value for human survival, in fact
masteries, if not paradoxes, of evolution.

The ridd