MATERIALISM AND MORALITY. 481 



is precisely what has been steadily dying out from modern art, as the 

 physical sciences have more and more imposed their sway upon our 

 ways of thinking and our habits of life. The true function of the 

 artist, as of the metaphysician, is to seek the reason and essence of 

 things. But while to the philosopher this reason and essence are re- 

 vealed in a principle, in a general conception, to the artist they are 

 revealed in a concrete form, as individual beauty. Both are seekers 

 after truth ; but the beautiful is the splendor of the true, and the 

 sense of beauty is the light of the intellect. Materialism quenches 

 that light. All that the artist now usually aims at is to copy exactly, 

 to reproduce phenomena. And here, indeed, he attains some measure 

 of success, especially if the phenomena be of the lupanarian order. 

 Well has Mr. Ruskin pronounced the art of our own time to be " a 

 poor toy, petty or vile." Perhaps its portraits are its most valuable 

 achievement. But their value is rather historical than artistic ; they 

 tell their own tale about the men and women of the age. What that 

 tale is, a distinguished French painter not long ago pointed out. They 

 are the abstract and brief chronicle, he observed, in which is written 

 the spiritual history of our century. During the first half of it, the 

 neck is thrown back, the head is upturned toward heaven, as if in 

 quest of some ideal vision. As we draw toward our own days the 

 neck contracts, the head sinks nearer the shoulders, as though by the 

 instinctive movement of a bull gathering himself up for the combat. 

 It is because the battle of life has become more intense, because the 

 mind is concentrated upon the material interests of the world. The 

 habit of thought — curious verification of a law of Darwin's — has trans- 

 formed the physical habit. A most delicate and sensitive intellect — 

 to whom British philistinism, with its " certitude de mauvais gout," 

 has largely paid the homage of its contumely and scorn — notes the same 

 fact in his own way. The substitution of the laws of dead matter for 

 the laws of the moral nature, the subjection of the soul to things, 

 " ecraser Phomme spirituel, depersonalizer Thomme " is, as Amiel dis- 

 cerned, the dominant tendency of the times. It appears to me that if 

 you survey the civilized world you find everywhere the same tokens. 

 Everywhere I note the practical triumph of that earth-to-earth phi- 

 losophy which will see nothing beyond experience, which shuts off the 

 approach of science to all that can not be weighed and measured. 

 Everywhere literature and art are losing themselves in the most vulgar 

 sensuousness. Look throughout Europe, and what, in every country, 

 are the great majority of the educated classes, who give the tone to 

 the rest ? Skeptics in religion, doubters in ethics, given over to in- 

 dustrialism, and to the exact sciences which minister to it, respecting 

 nothing but accomplished fact and palpable force, with nerves more 

 sensitive than their hearts, seeking to season the platitude of existence 

 by a more or less voluptuous asstheticism, a more or less prurient hedon- 

 ism. Such are the men of this new age. The intellectual atmosphere 



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