te
justification, then philosophy is evidently still prerational or,
rather, non-existent; for the beasts that listened to Orpheus belong to
this school.

To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and
aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so. Intoxication is a
sad business, at least for a philosopher; for you must either drown
yourself altogether, or else when sober again you will feel somewhat
fooled by yesterday's joys and somewhat lost in to-day's vacancy. The
man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to
elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. He is vexed
at conditions of excellence that make him conscious of his own
incompetence and failure. Rather than consider his function, he
proclaims his self-sufficiency. A way foolishness has of revenging
itself is to excommunicate the world.

It is in the world, however, that art must find its level. It must
vindicate its function in the human commonwealth. What direct acceptable
contribution does it make to the highest good? What sacrifices, if any,
does it impose? What indirect influence does it exert on other
activities? Our answer to these questions will be our apology for art,
our proof that art belongs to the Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial worth.]

When moralists deprecate passion and contrast it with reason, they do
so, if they are themselves rational, only because passion is so often
"guilty," because it works havoc so often in the surrounding world and
leaves, among other ruins, "a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed." Were
there no danger of such after-effects within and without the sufferer,
no passion would be reprehensible. Nature is innocent, and so are all
her impulses and moods when taken in isolation; it is only on meeting
that they blush. If it be true that matter is sinful, the logic of this
truth is far from being what the fanatics imagine who commonly propound
it. Matter is sinful only because it is insufficient, or is wastefully
distributed. There is not enough of it to go round among the legion of
hungry ideas. To embody or enact an idea is the only way of making it
actual; but its embodiment may mutilate it, if the material or the
situation is not propitious. So an infant may be maimed at birth, when
what injures him is not being brought forth, but being brought forth in
the wrong manner. Matter has a double function in respect to