n rum, and a mind with permanent interests to
defend may at once rule out everything inconsistent with possible
harmonies; but such rational judgments come from outside and represent a
compromise struck with material forces. Moral judgments and conflicts
are possible only in the mind that represents many interests
synthetically: in nature, where primary impulses collide, all conflict
is physical and all will innocent. Imagine some ingredient of humanity
loosed from its oppressive environment in human economy: it would at
once vegetate and flower into some ideal form, such as we see
exuberantly displayed in nature. If we can only suspend for a moment the
congested traffic in the brain, these initial movements will begin to
traverse it playfully and show their paces, and we shall live in one of
those plausible worlds which the actual world has made impossible.

[Sidenote: Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.]

Man possesses, for example, a native capacity for joy. There are
moments, in friendship or in solitude, when joy is realised; but the
occasions are often trivial and could never justify in reflection the
feelings that then happen to bubble up. Nor can pure joy be long
sustained: cross-currents of lassitude or anxiety, distracting
incidents, irrelevant associations, trouble its course and make it
languish, turning it before long into dulness or melancholy. Language
cannot express a joy that shall be full and pure; for to keep the purity
nothing would have to be named which carried the least suggestion of
sadness with it, and, in the world that human language refers to, such a
condition would exclude every situation possible. "O joy, O joy," would
be the whole ditty: hence some dialecticians, whose experience is
largely verbal, think whatever is pure necessarily thin.

[Sidenote: Music may do so.]

That feeling should be so quickly polluted is, however, a superficial
and earthly accident. Spirit is clogged by what it flows through, but at
its springs it is both limpid and abundant. There is matter enough in
joy for many a universe, though the actual world has not a single form
quite fit to embody it, and its too rapid syllables are excluded from
the current hexameter. Music, on the contrary, has a more flexible
measure; its prosody admits every word. Its rhythms can explicate every
emotion, through all degrees of complexity and volume, without once
disavowing it. Thus unused matter, which is not less f