HAPPINESS A RESULT OF PERFECTION. 449 



animated by an equal and altruistic zeal to prevent 

 the other's sacrificing himself to him/ 



And so with perfect beauty : what sphere would 

 remain for the exercise of the aesthetic consciousness 

 in a state in which material form has perhaps long 

 been transcended, and where no ugliness remained 

 to set off beauty by its contrast ? And if we say, 

 and say rightly, that our sense of the beautiful may 

 rise above the appreciation of the physical points 

 which at present almost engross it, and that beauty 

 would remain as the reflexion in consciousness of 

 the perfect order and harmony of Being, and the 

 perfect adjustment and correspondence of its factors, 

 this would yet be a use of the ideal of Beauty in a 

 superhuman sense. 



The ideal of Happiness is perhaps less inadequate 

 to describe the activity of Perfect Being than any 

 other, but the reason lies in its very vagueness. It 

 does not directly suggest to us any mode of being 

 perfectly happy, and rather insinuates that the means 

 of attaining happiness would be indifferent so long 

 as the aim was attained. And this is profoundly 

 true, in the sense that no one can be more than 

 happy, and the perfect attainment of any of the other 

 ideals, e.g., either of goodness or of knowledge, would 

 necessarily draw perfect happiness in its train. 



But even the ideal of happiness is liable to objec- 

 tion as suggesting an exclusion of the other activities 

 rather than the culminating crown and final perfec- 

 tion of an all-inclusive adjustment of all the activities 



^ It is to such a metaphysical ideal ot a supra-moral state tliat 

 Mr. Spencer's "absolute ethics" refer, and they are justly obnox- 

 ious only to the criticism that he does not seem to realize what 

 a radical difference from the conditions of our present world 

 they would involve. 



K.ofs. G G 



