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more or less perfectly developed by circumstances, and grow by use and 

 cultivation 1 



Most of these difficulties vanish if we realize the distinction between the 

 real and the ideal. The ideal is that type to which the real ever tends, as the 

 curve to its asymptote, and the infinite series to its sum, although the one 

 never reaches the other in finite time and space. If you take every oak leaf 

 upon an oak tree, you will perceive that they have all one type, although they 

 all differ from one another. You can conceive the idea of an oak leaf having 

 that perfect form towards which each individual tends, but of which each falls 

 short, some in one particular, some in another ; but which the imagination 

 seems to grasp, as the possible perfect form of the oak leaf in its full development. 

 I have already noticed the perfection of Greek Art ; this it was which was 

 the key to its excellence — that the artist sought, by the study of the imperfect 

 individual, to reach the conception of the ideal, and so to symbolise the idea of 

 a god under the material form of a perfect man. 



If, then, we would emancipate ourselves from the difficulties which so 

 often entwine us in sesthetical as well as ethical questions, we must shake .off 

 the trammels which imperfect development casts around every subject, every 

 idea, every faculty ; and endeavour to look, not from the lower standing ground 

 of the real, but from the loftier region of the ideal. Thus we shall recognise 

 that only to be perfectly and eternally true, which man, in the most perfect 

 development of his intellectual faculties, would recognise as such. We should 

 accept as morally right, not that which may seem to man, living under 

 provisional and circumstantial law, to be so, but that which man, in the full 

 perfection of his moral faculties, would acknowledge as a perfect moral law. 

 And so we shall receive as a standard of true excellence in Art, and regard 

 those only to be manifestations of perfect beauty, which man, in the ideal and 

 perfect development of his aesthetic capacity, would feel to be in perfect affinity 

 and harmony with his power of appreciating the beautiful. 



But I would endeavour, if I do not weary you, to trace even further the 

 relations which may possibly subsist between, subjectively, the intellectual, 

 ethical, and sesthetical powers in man ; objectively, between truth, goodness, 

 and beauty, in the harmony of things. It seems to me, that prior to the 

 conception of all created being and all action, and, a priori, prior to the idea of 

 matter, we must conceive some necessary law or principle underlying and 

 pervading the whole structure ; underlying, as it were, the possibility of any 

 scheme of creation whatever. Such a principle seems to me to be — the law of 

 truth : and by truth I mean perfect consistency — the perfect harmony of part 

 with part, and of every part with the whole. This is, if we consider it, the 

 widest and most accurate definition of truth. Its absence involves the idea of 

 something more than chaos — of an impossibility of existence at all. This idea 

 of truth seems to be the essence of all possible schemes of all possible creations. 

 The dogma that " God is truth," which we reverently receive as in harmony 

 with our instincts in religion, is not only the assertion of a fact, or the 

 attribution of an incidental quality to the Deity : it is the enunciation of a 

 necessary philosophical law. Without the law of truth, we are incapable of 

 conceiving that a universe could have been created, or a God could have 

 existed to make it. Now we first come in contact with this principle of 

 truth — involving the idea of its co-relative untruth — in abstract reason. And 

 we have a faculty or quality of our minds, our pure intellect, which recognises 

 and accepts this law in matter's which are independent of all action and of 

 all matter. But the moment the idea of a being capable of action is introduced, 

 it follows that the quality of his action must be determined by the same all- 

 pervading law. Moral goodness, therefore, is truth in action : it is the 

 operation of truth performed upon action : or to use a mathematical formula, 



