t becomes absurd when its basis
in a particular disposition is ignored and it pretends to have an
absolute or metaphysical scope. Reason, with the order which in every
region it imposes on life, is grounded on an animal nature and has no
other function than to serve the same; and it fails to exercise its
office quite as much when it oversteps its bounds and forgets whom it is
serving as when it neglects some part of its legitimate province and
serves its master imperfectly, without considering all his interests.

Dialectic, logic, and morals lose their authority and become inept if
they trespass upon the realm of physics and try to disclose existences;
while physics is a mere idea in the realm of poetic meditation. So the
notorious diversities which human taste exhibits do not become
conflicts, and raise no moral problem, until their basis or their
function has been forgotten, and each has claimed a right to assert
itself exclusively. This claim is altogether absurd, and we might fail
to understand how so preposterous an attitude could be assumed by
anybody did we not remember that every young animal thinks himself
absolute, and that dogmatism in the thinker is only the speculative side
of greed and courage in the brute. The brute cannot surrender his
appetites nor abdicate his primary right to dominate his environment.
What experience and reason may teach him is merely how to make his
self-assertion well balanced and successful. In the same way taste is
bound to maintain its preferences but free to rationalise them. After a
man has compared his feelings with the no less legitimate feelings of
other creatures, he can reassert his own with more complete authority,
since now he is aware of their necessary ground in his nature, and of
their affinities with whatever other interests his nature enables him to
recognise in others and to co-ordinate with his own.

[Sidenote: Taste gains in authority as it is more and more widely
based.]

A criterion of taste is, therefore, nothing but taste itself in its more
deliberate and circumspect form. Reflection refines particular
sentiments by bringing them into sympathy with all rational life. There
is consequently the greatest possible difference in authority between
taste and taste, and while delight in drums and eagle's feathers is
perfectly genuine and has no cause to blush for itself, it cannot be
compared in scope or representative value with delight in a symphony or
an epic.