t could relevance or support be worth if the things to be
buttressed were themselves worthless? It is not to organise pain,
ugliness, and boredom that reason can be called into the world.

[Sidenote: To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them.]

When a practical or scientific man boasts that he has laid aside
aesthetic prejudices and is following truth and utility with a single
eye, he can mean, if he is judicious, only that he has not yielded to
aesthetic preference after his problem was fixed, nor in an arbitrary and
vexatious fashion. He has not consulted taste when it would have been in
bad taste to do so. If he meant that he had rendered himself altogether
insensible to aesthetic values, and that he had proceeded to organise
conduct or thought in complete indifference to the beautiful, he would
be simply proclaiming his inhumanity and incompetence. A right
observance of aesthetic demands does not obstruct utility nor logic; for
utility and logic are themselves beautiful, while a sensuous beauty that
ran counter to reason could never be, in the end, pleasing to an
exquisite sense. AEsthetic vice is not favourable to aesthetic faculty: it
is an impediment to the greatest aesthetic satisfactions. And so when by
yielding to a blind passion for beauty we derange theory and practice,
we cut ourselves off from those beauties which alone could have
satisfied our passion. What we drag in so obstinately will bring but a
cheap and unstable pleasure, while a double beauty will thereby be lost
or obscured--first, the unlooked-for beauty which a genuine and stable
system of things could not but betray, and secondly the coveted beauty
itself, which, being imported here into the wrong context, will be
rendered meretricious and offensive to good taste. If a jewel worn on
the wrong finger sends a shiver through the flesh, how disgusting must
not rhetoric be in diplomacy or unction in metaphysics!

[Sidenote: They flow naturally from perfect function.]

The poetic element inherent in thought, affection, and conduct is prior
to their prosaic development and altogether legitimate. Clear,
well-digested perception and rational choices follow upon those primary
creative impulses, and carry out their purpose systematically. At every
stage in this development new and appropriate materials are offered for
aesthetic contemplation. Straightness, for instance, symmetry, and rhythm
are at first sensuously defined; they are characters