l impulses and find experimental
rewards. This fact, in betraying their analogy to aesthetic activity,
enables them also to vindicate their excellence.

CHAPTER IX

JUSTIFICATION OF ART

[Sidenote: Art is subject to moral censorship.]

It is no longer the fashion among philosophers to decry art. Either its
influence seems to them too slight to excite alarm, or their systems are
too lax to subject anything to censure which has the least glamour or
ideality about it. Tired, perhaps, of daily resolving the conflict
between science and religion, they prefer to assume silently a harmony
between morals and art. Moral harmonies, however, are not given; they
have to be made. The curse of superstition is that it justifies and
protracts their absence by proclaiming their invisible presence. Of
course a rational religion could not conflict with a rational science;
and similarly an art that was wholly admirable would necessarily play
into the hands of progress. But as the real difficulty in the former
case lies in saying what religion and what science would be truly
rational, so here the problem is how far extant art is a benefit to
mankind, and how far, perhaps, a vice or a burden.

[Sidenote: Its initial or specific excellence is not enough.]

That art is _prima facie_ and in itself a good cannot be doubted. It is
a spontaneous activity, and that settles the question. Yet the function
of ethics is precisely to revise _prima facie_ judgments of this kind
and to fix the ultimate resultant of all given interests, in so far as
they can be combined. In the actual disarray of human life and desire,
wisdom consists in knowing what goods to sacrifice and what simples to
pour into the supreme mixture. The extent to which aesthetic values are
allowed to colour the resultant or highest good is a point of great
theoretic importance, not only for art but for general philosophy. If
art is excluded altogether or given only a trivial role, perhaps as a
necessary relaxation, we feel at once that a philosophy so judging human
arts is ascetic or post-rational. It pretends to guide life from above
and from without; it has discredited human nature and mortal interests,
and has thereby undermined itself, since it is at best but a partial
expression of that humanity which it strives to transcend. If, on the
contrary, art is prized as something supreme and irresponsible, if the
poetic and mystic glow which it may bring seems its own comple