126 PESSIMISM. 



sensibilities as the redeemino^ feature in life. For 

 as disputes about taste show, our sense of beauty 

 hardly yet gives rise to objectively valid judgments. 

 It is still in so rudimentary a state of development 

 that we are in most cases quite unable to justify its 

 judgments, and to say how and why anything is 

 beautiful. We may indeed conjecture that in the 

 end aesthetic emotion would be found to be the 

 crowning approval of a perfect harmony, of a com- 

 plete adaptation of means to ends, of an exact fitness 

 of things. But if so, a developed sense of the 

 beautiful would find little to admire In a world like 

 ours, in which all things are more or less discordant 

 and unadapted. What wonder, then, that of true 

 beauty we should have no perception and no under- 

 standing ? 



But even the imperfect sense of beauty we have 

 developed is a bane rather than a blessing. For 

 even by its standard the vast majority of things in 

 the world are ugly, and the longing for the beautiful 

 can be gratified only at the cost of much subserv- 

 ience to the hideous and the loathsome. 



And then the pursuit of the beautiful brings us 

 Into frequent conflict with the good ; for though w^e 

 may come to perceive in some cases that the good 

 is beautiful, it is yet far from being the case that 

 the beautiful Is always good. The antagonism, too, 

 between the useful and the ornamental is too well 

 known to require comment. 



But the most fatal effect of the development of 

 the aesthetic sense Is Its influence upon our feelings. 

 It renders us sensitive to evils which we had not 

 had the refinement to perceive before, and it causes 

 us to shrink in disgust from evils we had thought 

 it our duty to face, and to grapple with. The 



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