on is
adjusted to it. The hatred of change and death is ineradicable while
life lasts, since it expresses that self-sustaining organisation in a
creature which we call its soul; yet this hatred of change and death is
not so deeply seated in the nature of things as are death and change
themselves, for the flux is deeper than the ideal. Discipline may attune
our higher and more adaptable part to the harsh conditions of being, and
the resulting sentiment, being the only one which can be maintained
successfully, will express the greatest satisfactions which can be
reached, though not the greatest that might be conceived or desired. To
be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a
happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. Wisdom
discovers these possible accommodations, as circumstances impose them;
and education ought to prepare men to accept them.

[Sidenote: He who loves beauty must chasten it.]

It is for want of education and discipline that a man so often insists
petulantly on his random tastes, instead of cultivating those which
might find some satisfaction in the world and might produce in him some
pertinent culture. Untutored self-assertion may even lead him to deny
some fact that should have been patent, and plunge him into needless
calamity. His Utopias cheat him in the end, if indeed the barbarous
taste he has indulged in clinging to them does not itself lapse before
the dream is half formed. So men have feverishly conceived a heaven only
to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. Theodicies that
were to demonstrate an absolute cosmic harmony have turned the universe
into a tyrannous nightmare, from which we are glad to awake again in
this unintentional and somewhat tractable world. Thus the fancies of
effeminate poets in violating science are false to the highest art, and
the products of sheer confusion, instigated by the love of beauty, turn
out to be hideous. A rational severity in respect to art simply weeds
the garden; it expresses a mature aesthetic choice and opens the way to
supreme artistic achievements. To keep beauty in its place is to make
all things beautiful.

CHAPTER X

THE CRITERION OF TASTE

[Sidenote: Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened.]

Dogmatism in matters of taste has the same status as dogmatism in other
spheres. It is initially justified by sincerity, being a systematic
expression of a man's preferences; but i