etative life,
as languages possess euphony. Two reports of the same fact may be
equally trustworthy, equally useful as information, yet they may embody
two types of mental rhetoric, and this diversity in genius may be of
more intrinsic importance than the raw fact it works upon. The
non-representative side of human perception may thus be the most
momentous side of it, because it represents, or even constitutes, the
man. After all, the chief interest we have in things lies in what we can
make of them or what they can make of us. There is consequently nothing
fitted to colour human happiness more pervasively than art does, nor to
express more deeply the mind's internal habit. In educating the
imagination art crowns all moral endeavour, which from the beginning is
a species of art, and which becomes a fine art more completely as it
works in a freer medium.

[Sidenote: The importance of aesthetic goods varies with temperaments.]

How great a portion of human energies should be spent on art and its
appreciation is a question to be answered variously by various persons
and nations. There is no ideal _a priori_; an ideal can but express, if
it is genuine, the balance of impulses and potentialities in a given
soul. A mind at once sensuous and mobile will find its appropriate
perfection in studying and reconstructing objects of sense. Its
rationality will appear chiefly on the plane of perception, to render
the circle of visions which makes up its life as delightful as possible.
For such a man art will be the most satisfying, the most significant
activity, and to load him with material riches or speculative truths or
profound social loyalties will be to impede and depress him. The
irrational is what does not justify itself in the end; and the born
artist, repelled by the soberer and bitterer passions of the world, may
justly call them irrational. They would not justify themselves in his
experience; they make grievous demands and yield nothing in the end
which is intelligible to him. His picture of them, if he be a dramatist,
will hardly fail to be satirical; fate, frailty, illusion will be his
constant themes. If his temperament could find political expression, he
would minimise the machinery of life and deprecate any calculated
prudence. He would trust the heart, enjoy nature, and not frown too
angrily on inclination. Such a Bohemia he would regard as an ideal world
in which humanity might flourish congenially.

[Sidenote: T