Memory of Currency

Words are public tokens for private experiences.

What words add is not power of discernment or action, but a medium of intellectual exchange. Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator. And as money must have a certain intrinsic value of its own in order that its relation to other values may be stable, so a word, by which a thing is represented in discourse, must be a part of that thing's context, an ingredient in the total apparition it is destined to recall. Words, in their existence, are no more universal than gold by nature is a worthless standard of value in other things.

Suppose an animal going down to a frozen river which he had previously visited in summer. Marks of all sorts would awaken in him an old train of reactions; he would doubtless feel premonitions of satisfied thirst and the splash of water. On finding, however, instead of the fancied liquid, a mass of something like cold stone, he would be disconcerted. His active attitude would be pulled up short and contradicted. In his fairyland of faith and magic the old river would have been simply annihilated, the dreamt-of water would have become a vanished ghost, and this ice for the moment the hard reality. He would turn away and live for a while on other illusions. When this shock was overgrown by time and it was summer again, the original habit might, however, reassert itself once more. If he revisited the stream, some god would seem to bring back something from an old familiar world; and the chill of that temporary estrangement, the cloud that for a while had made the good invisible, would soon be gone and forgotten.

If we imagine, on the contrary, that this animal could speak and had from the first called his haunt the river, he would have repeated its name on seeing it even when it was frozen, for he had not failed to recognise it in that guise. The variation afterwards noticed, upon finding it hard, would seem no total substitution, but a change; for it would be the same river, once flowing, that was now congealed. An identical word, covering all the identical qualities in the phenomena and serving to abstract them, would force the inconsistent qualities in those phenomena to pass for accidents; and the useful proposition could at once be framed that the same river may be sometimes free and sometimes frozen.

Words are a material accompaniment of phenomena, at first an idle accompaniment, but one which happens to subserve easily a universal function, just by virtue of their adventitious, detachable status, and because they are so easily compared and shaped in the world of sound, were singularly well fitted for this office.

Between music and bare symbolism language has its florid expansion. Until music is subordinated, speech has little sense; it can hardly tell a story or indicate an object unequivocally. Yet if music were left behind altogether, language would pass into a sort of computer algebra or vocal shorthand, without literary quality; it would become wholly indicative and record facts without colouring them ideally. This medium and its intrinsic development, though they make the bane of reproduction, make the essence of art; they give representation a new and specific value such as the object, before representation, could not have possessed. Consciousness itself is such a medium in respect to diffuse existence, which it foreshortens and elevates into synthetic ideas. Reason, too, by bringing the movement of events and inclinations to a head in single acts of reflection, thus attaining to laws and purposes, introduces into life the influence of a representative medium, without which life could never pass from a process into an art. Language vitiates the experience it expresses, but thereby makes the burden of one moment relevant to that of another.

The two experiences, identified roughly with the same concretion in discourse, are pronounced similar or comparable in character. Thus a proverb, by its verbal pungency and rhythm, becomes more memorable than the event it first described would ever have been if not translated into an epigram and rendered, so to speak, applicable to new cases; for by that translation the event has become an idea.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature. Music, which in a certain sense is a mass of pure forms, must leave its "ideas" imbedded in their own medium—they are musical ideas—and cannot impose them on any foreign material, such as human affairs. Science, on the contrary, seeks to disclose the bleak anatomy of existence, stripping off as much as possible the veil of prejudice and words. Literature takes a middle course and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be futile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making music thereby significant. Literary art in the end rejects all unmeaning nourishes, all complications that have no counterpart in things or no use in expressing their relations; at the same time it aspires to digest that reality to which it confines itself, making it over into ideal substance and material for the mind. It looks at things with an incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which they never are) and almost into persons, grouping them by their imaginative or moral affinities and retaining in them chiefly what is incidental to their being, namely, the part they may chance to play in man's adventures.

Such literary art demands a subject-matter other than the literary impulse itself. The writer is an interpreter and hardly succeeds, as the musician may, without experience and mastery of human affairs. Her art is half genius and half fidelity. She needs inspiration; she must wait for automatic musical tendencies to ferment in her mind, proving it to be fertile in devices, comparisons, and bold assimilations. Yet inspiration alone will lead her astray, for her art is relative to something other than its own formal impulse; it comes to clarify the real world, not to encumber it; and it needs to render its native agility practical and to attach its volume of feeling to what is momentous in human life. Literature has its piety, its conscience; it cannot long forget, without forfeiting all dignity, that it serves a burdened and perplexed creature, a human animal struggling to persuade the universal Sphinx to propose a more intelligible riddle. Irresponsible and trivial in its abstract impulse, the word, as humanity’s currency becomes noble as it becomes symbolic; its representative function lends it a serious beauty, its utility endows it with moral worth.

Just as currency requires our sustained belief in its capacity to represent and exchange value, symbolic dignity is maintained through an implicit covenant between speaker and listener to faithfully represent what it names. To put value in pleasure and pain, regarding a given quantity of pain as balancing a given quantity of pleasure, is to bring to practical ethics a worthy intention to be clear and, what is more precious, an undoubted honesty not always found in those moralists who maintain the opposite opinion and care more for edification than for truth. For in spite of all logical and psychological scruples, conduct that should not justify itself somehow by the satisfactions secured and the pains avoided would not justify itself at all. The most instinctive and unavoidable desire is forthwith chilled if you discover that its ultimate end is to be a preponderance of suffering; and what arrests this desire is not fear or weakness but conscience in its most categorical and sacred guise. As no sane economy traffics in transactions that ensure its ruin, the mind refuses to invest in actions whose anticipated returns are suffering. Who would not be ashamed to acknowledge or to propose so inhuman an action?

By sad experience rooted impulses may be transformed or even obliterated. And quite intelligibly: for the idea of pain is already the sign and the beginning of a certain stoppage. To imagine failure is to interpret ideally a felt inhibition. To prophesy a check would be impossible but for an incipient movement already meeting an incipient arrest. Intensified, this prophecy becomes its own fulfilment and totally inhibits the opposed tendency. Therefore a mind that foresees pain to be the ultimate result of action cannot continue unreservedly to act, seeing that its foresight is the conscious transcript of a recoil already occurring. Conversely, the mind that surrenders itself wholly to any impulse must think that its execution would be delightful. A perfectly wise and representative will, therefore, would aim only at what, in its attainment, could continue to be aimed at and approved; and this is another way of saying that its aim would secure the maximum of satisfaction eventually possible.

Any system that, for some sinister reason, should absolve itself from good-will toward all creatures, and make it somehow a duty to secure their misery, would be clearly disloyal to reason, humanity, and justice. Nor would it be hard, in that case, to point out what superstition, what fantastic obsession, or what private fury, had made those persons blind to prudence and kindness in so plain a matter. Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. The question, however, what happiness shall consist in, its complexion if it should once arise, can only be determined by reference to natural demands and capacities; so that while satisfaction by the attainment of ends can alone justify their pursuit, this pursuit itself must exist first and be spontaneous, thereby fixing the goals of endeavour and distinguishing the states in which satisfaction might be found. Natural disposition, therefore, is the principle of preference and makes morality and happiness possible.

The standard of value, like every standard, must be one. Pleasures and pains are not only infinitely diverse but, even if reduced to their total bulk and abstract opposition, they remain two. Their values must be compared, and obviously neither one can be the standard by which to judge the other. This standard is an ideal involved in the judgment passed, whatever that judgment may be. Taste is formed in the moments when æsthetic emotion is massive and distinct; preferences then grown conscious, judgments then put into words, will reverberate through calmer hours; they will constitute prejudices, habits of apperception, secret standards for all other beauties. A period of life in which such intuitions have been frequent may amass tastes and ideals sufficient for the rest of our days. Youth in these matters governs maturity, and while men may develop their early impressions more systematically and find confirmations of them in various quarters, they will seldom look at the world afresh or use new categories in deciphering it. Half our standards come from our first mentors, and the other half from our first loves. Never being so deeply stirred again, we remain persuaded that no objects save those we then discovered can have a true sublimity. These high-water marks of æsthetic life may easily be reached under tutelage. It may be some eloquent appreciations read in a book, or some preference expressed by a gifted friend, that may have revealed unsuspected beauties in art or nature; and then, since our own perception was vicarious and obviously a recollection in volume to that which our mentor possessed, we shall take her judgments for our criterion, since they were the source and exemplar of all our own. Thus the volume and intensity of some appreciations, especially when nothing of the kind has preceded, makes them authoritative over our subsequent judgments. On those warm moments hang all our cold systematic opinions; and while the latter fill our days and shape our careers it is only the former that are crucial and alive. The race which loves beauty holds the same place in history that a season of love or enthusiasm holds in an individual life. Such a race has a preeminent right to pronounce upon beauty and to bequeath its judgments to duller peoples.

When good taste has in this way purified and digested some turgid medley, it still has a progress to make. Ideas, like men, live in society. Not only has each a will of its own and an inherent ideal, but each finds itself conditioned for its expression by a host of other beings, on whose cooperation it depends. Good taste, besides being inwardly clear, has to be outwardly fit. A monstrous ideal devours and dissolves itself, but even a rational one does not find an embodiment simply for being inwardly possible and free from contradiction. It needs a material basis, a soil and situation propitious to its growth. This basis, as it varies, makes the ideal vary which is simply its expression; and therefore no ideal can be ultimately fixed in ignorance of the conditions that may modify it. It subsists, to be sure, as an eternal possibility, independently of all further earthly revolutions. Once expressed, it has revealed the inalienable values that attach to a certain form of being, whenever that form is actualised. But its expression may have been only momentary, and that eternal ideal may have no further relevance to the living world. A criterion of taste, however, looks to a social career; it hopes to educate and to judge. In order to be an applicable and a just law, it must represent the interests along with which it would preside.

There are many undiscovered ideals. There are many beauties which nothing in this world can embody or suggest. There are also many once suggested or even embodied, which find later their basis gone and evaporate into their native heaven. The saddest tragedy in the world is the destruction of what has within it no inward ground of dissolution, death in youth, and the crushing out of perfection. Imagination has its bereavements of this kind. There are times, although rare, in moments less propitious, that the soul is subdued to what it works in, and loses its power of idealization and hope. Awed by the magnitude of a reality that we can no longer conceive as free from evil, we try to assert that its evil also is a good; and we poison the very essence of the good to make its extension universal. By a pathetic and superstitious self-depreciation, we then punish ourselves for the imperfection of nature. This incapacity of the imagination to reconstruct the conditions of life and build the frame of things nearer to the heart's desire is dangerous to a steady loyalty to what is noble and fine. We surrender ourselves to a kind of miscellaneous appreciation, without standard or goal; and calling every vexatious apparition by the name of beauty, we become incapable of discriminating its excellence or feeling its value.

The appreciation of beauty and its embodiment in the arts are activities which belong to our holiday life, when we are redeemed for the moment from the shadow of evil and the slavery to fear, and are following the bent of our imaginative nature where it chooses to lead us. The values, then, with which we deal in aesthetics, are positive; they were negative in the sphere of morality. The truth is that morality is not mainly concerned with the attainment of pleasure; it is rather concerned, in all its deeper and more authoritative maxims, with the prevention of suffering. Earnest minds, that feel the weight and dignity of life, rebel against the assertion that the aim of right conduct is enjoyment. Pleasure usually appears to them as a temptation, and they sometimes go so far as to make avoidance of it a virtue. The moment, however, that society emerges from the early pressure of the environment and is tolerably secure against primary evils, morality grows lax. The forms that life will farther assume are not to be imposed by moral authority, but are determined by the genius of the race, the opportunities of the moment, and the tastes and resources of individual minds. The reign of duty gives place to the reign of freedom, and the law and the covenant to the dispensation of grace. Beauty and ingenuity will drive the economy of the future.

In the perception of beauty, our judgment is necessarily intrinsic and based on the character of the immediate experience, and never consciously on the idea of an eventual utility in the object, whilst judgments about moral worth, on the contrary, are always based, when they are positive, upon the consciousness of benefits probably involved. The ugly is hardly an exception, because it is not the cause of any real pain. In itself it is rather a source of amusement.

Whence we plunge into the era of beauty and imagination it helps us to study the position art occupies in our current imperiled lives as herein lies the greatest difficulty and nicety of art. It must not only create things abstractly beautiful, but it must conciliate all the competitors these may have to the attention of the world, and must know how to insinuate their charms among the objects of our passion.

Moral ideas exert vital influence over aesthetic judgments. Our sense of practical benefit not only determines the moral value of beauty, but sometimes even its existence as an aesthetic good. Forms in themselves pleasing may become disagreeable when the practical interests then uppermost in the mind cannot, without violence, yield a place to them. Thus, too much eloquence in a diplomatic document, or in a familiar letter, or in a prayer, is an offence not only against practical sense, but also against taste. The occasion has tuned us to a certain key of sentiment, and deprived us of the power to respond to other stimuli. They are offensive, not in themselves, – for nothing is intrinsically ugly, – but by virtue of our present demand for something different. A prison as gay as a bazaar, a church as dumb as a prison, offend by their failure to support by their aesthetic quality the moral emotion with, which we approach them. The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. This is the consequence of the superficial stratum on which they flourish; their roots, as we have seen, are not deep in the world, and they appear only as unstable, superadded activities, employments of our freedom, after the work of life is done and the terror of it is allayed. Arts, therefore, fit their forms, like parasites, to the stouter growths to which they cling.

But this subserviency and enforced humility of beauty is not without its virtue and reward. If the aesthetic habit lie under the necessity of respecting and observing our passions, it possesses the privilege of soothing our griefs. There is no situation so terrible that it may not be relieved by the momentary pause of the mind to contemplate it aesthetically. Grief itself becomes in this way not wholly pain; a sweetness is added to it by our reflection. The saddest scenes may lose their bitterness in their beauty. The aesthetic world is limited in its scope; it must submit to the control of the organizing reason, and not trespass upon more useful and holy ground. The garden must not encroach upon the cornfields; but the eye of the gardener may transform the cornfields themselves by dint of loving observation into a garden of a soberer kind. In that ideal our faculties will find their freest employment and their most congenial world.

Yet, when the moments by which we learn from suffering become occluded, we are estranged to stumble blindly through the same sorrows again and again. Such occlusion afflicts the reflective faculties when memory runs contingent, leaving us unable to learn from what one can no longer reliably recall. In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of mortality. Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor; and the possession of memory, by which we somehow survive in representation, is the most unmistakable proof that we are perishing in reality. As it is memory that enables us to feel that we are dying and to know that everything actual is in flux, so it is memory that opens to us an ideal immortality. It is an immortality in representation, a representation which envisages things in their truth as they have in their own day possessed themselves in reality. It is no subterfuge or superstitious effrontery, called to disguise or throw off the lessons of experience; on the contrary, it is experience itself, reflection itself, and knowledge of mortality. Memory does not reprieve or postpone the changes which it registers, nor does it itself possess a permanent duration; it is, if possible, less stable and more mobile than primary sensation. It is, in point of existence, only an internal and complex kind of sensibility. But in intent and by its significance it plunges to the depths of time; it looks still on the departed and bears witness to the truth that, though absent from this part of experience, and incapable of returning to life, they nevertheless existed once in their own right, were as living and actual as experience is today, and still help to make up, in company with all past, present, and future mortals, the filling and value of the world.

As the pathos and heroism of life consists in accepting as an opportunity the fate that makes our own death, partial or total, serviceable to others, so the glory of life consists in accepting the knowledge of natural death as an opportunity to live in the spirit. The sacrifice, the self-surrender, remains real; for, though the compensation is real, too, and at moments, perhaps, apparently overwhelming, it is always incomplete and leaves beneath an incurable sorrow. Yet life can never contradict its basis or reach satisfactions essentially excluded by its own conditions. Progress lies in moving forward from the given situation, and satisfying as well as may be the interests that exist. And if some initial demand has proved hopeless, there is the greater reason for cultivating other sources of satisfaction, possibly more abundant and lasting. Now, reflection is a vital function; memory and imagination have to the full the rhythm and force of life. But these faculties, in envisaging the past or the ideal, envisage the eternal, and the man in whose mind they predominate is to that extent detached in his affections from the world of flux, from himself, and from his personal destiny.

There is accordingly an escape from death open to man; one not found by circumventing nature, but by making use of her own expedients in circumventing her imperfections. Memory, nay, perception itself, is a first stage in this escape, which coincides with the acquisition and possession of reason. When the meaning of successive perceptions is recovered with the last of them, when a survey is made of objects whose constitutive sensations first arose independently, this synthetic moment contains an object raised above time on a pedestal of reflection, a thought indefeasibly true in its ideal deliverance, though of course fleeting in its psychic existence. Existence is essentially temporal and life foredoomed to be mortal, since its basis is a process and an opposition; it floats in the stream of time, never to return, never to be recovered or repossessed. But ever since substance became at some sensitive point intelligent and reflective, ever since time made room and pause for memory, for history, for the consciousness of time, a god, as it were, became incarnate in mortality and some vision of truth, some self-forgetful satisfaction, became a heritage that moment could transmit to moment and man to man. This heritage is humanity itself, the presence of immortal reason in creatures that perish. Apprehension, which makes man so like a god, makes him in one respect immortal; it quickens his numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, the truth of those moments and their inalienable values.

To participate in this vision is to participate at once in humanity and in divinity, since all other makes bonds are material and perishable, but the bond between two thoughts that have grasped the same truth, of two instants that have caught the same beauty, is a spiritual and imperishable bond. It is imperishable simply because it is ideal and resident merely in import and intent. The two thoughts, the two instants, remain existentially different; were they not two they could not come from different quarters to unite in one meaning and to behold one object in distinct and conspiring acts of apprehension. Being independent in existence, they can be united by the identity of their burden, by the common worship, so to speak, of the same god. Were this ideal goal itself an existence, it would be incapable of uniting anything; for the same gulf which separated the two original minds would open between them and their common object. But being, as it is, purely ideal, it can become the meeting-ground of intelligences and render their union ideally eternal. Among the physical instruments of thought there may be rivalry and impact – the two thinkers may compete and clash – but this is because each seeks his own physical survival and does not love the truth stripped of its accidental associations and provincial accent. The conflict is physical and can extend to the subject-matter only in so far as this is tainted by individual prejudice and not wholly lifted from the sensuous to the intellectual plane. In the ether there are no winds of doctrine. The intellect, being the organ and source of the divine, is divine and single; if there were many sorts of intellect, many principles of perspective, they would fix and create incomparable and irrelevant worlds. Reason is one in that it gravitates toward an object, called truth, which could not have the function it has, of being a focus for mental activities, if it were not one in reference to the operations which converge upon it.

This unity in truth, as in reason, is of course functional only, not physical or existential. The heats of thought and the thinkers are innumerable; indefinite, too, the variations to which their endowment and habits may be subjected. But the condition of spiritual communion or ideal relevance in these intelligences is their possession of a method and grammar essentially identical. Language, for example, is significant in proportion to the constancy in meaning which words and locutions preserve in a speaker's mind at various times, or in the minds of various persons. This constancy is never absolute. Therefore language is never wholly significant, never exhaustively intelligible. There is always mud in the well, if we have drawn up enough water. Yet in peaceful rivers, though they flow, there is an appreciable degree of translucency. So, from moment to moment, and from man to man, there is an appreciable element of unanimity, of constancy and congruity of intent. On this abstract and perfectly identical function science rests together with every rational formation.

Unity in intent extends as far as do physical bonds, the function of reason being to bring life into harmony with its conditions, so as to render it self-perpetuating and free. This end can never be attained while the scope of moral fellowship is narrower than that of physical interplay. Ancient civilisation, brilliant in proportion to its inner integration, was brief in proportion to its outer injustice. By defying the external forces on which also a commonwealth depends, those commonwealths came to premature extinction. The purpose of war must be peace; the purpose of competition a more general prosperity; the purpose of personal life ideal achievements. The organisation which the ancients insisted on within each state, the sacrifices they imposed on each class in the community for the general welfare, are repeated in that greater commonwealth of which cities and nations are citizens; for their own existence and prosperity depends on conciliating inwardly all that may affect them and turning foreign forces, when contact with them is inevitable, into friends.

We have grown so accustomed to measuring statesmanship by its skill in distributing scarcity and adjudicating fear that we have forgotten such distribution and adjudication were never the end of association among men, but only its grim apprenticeship. The whole vocabulary of our public life: security, interest, right, the balance of power, the consent of the governed, is the vocabulary of creatures still in the early pressure of the environment, bargaining for survival against one another and against the indifference of things. To suppose that politics is forever and essentially the management of mutual distrust, is to mistake the frozen river for a stranger and not for the old stream merely changed. Human commonwealth ought to let that name force its inconsistent appearances to pass for being as is the city under siege with the city at peace both are but still one city. In this, all subjects, even the most repellent, when the circumstances of life thrust them before us, can be observed with curiosity and treated with art. The calling forth of these aesthetic functions softens the violence of our sympathetic reaction. If death, for instance, did not exist and did not thrust itself upon our thoughts with painful importunity, art would never have been called upon to soften and dignify it, by presenting it in beautiful forms and surrounding it with consoling associations. The agreeableness of the presentation is thus mixed with the horror of the thing; and the result is that while we are saddened by the truth, we are delighted by the vehicle that conveys it to us. The mixture of these emotions constitutes the peculiar flavour and poignancy of pathos. But because unlovely objects and feelings are often so familiar as to be indifferent or so momentous as to be alone in the mind, we are led into the confusion of supposing that beauty depends upon them for its aesthetic value.

Since these aesthetic effects include some of the most moving and profound beauties, some persons have not been slow to turn the unanalysed paradox of their formation into a principle, and to explain by it the presence and necessity of evil. As in the tragic and the sublime, they have thought, the sufferings and dangers to which a hero is exposed seem to add to his virtue and dignity, and to our sacred joy in the contemplation of him, so the sundry evils of life may be elements in the transcendent glory of the whole. And once fired by this thought, those who pretend to justify the ways of God to man have, naturally, not stopped to consider whether so edifying a phenomenon was not a hasty illusion. The child smiles (without knowing it) when he feels pleasure; and the nurse smiles back; his own pleasure is associated with her conduct, and her smile is therefore expressive of pleasure. The fact of his pleasure at her smile is the ground of his instinctive belief in her pleasure in it. Children, indeed, may innocently torture animals, not having enough sense of analogy to be stopped by the painful suggestions of their writhings; and, although in a rough way we soon correct these crying misinterpretations by a better classification of experience, we nevertheless remain essentially subject to the same error. These reflections may make less surprising to us what is the most striking fact about the nature of expression; namely, that the value acquired by the expressive thing is often of an entirely different kind from that which the thing expressed possesses.

The glorious joy of self-assertion in the face of an uncontrollable world is indeed so deep and entire, that it furnishes just that transcendent element of worth for which we were looking when we tried to understand how the expression of pain could sometimes please. It can please, not in itself, but in equipoise, pain is liberating by being balanced and annulled by positive pleasures, especially by this final and victorious one of ideal representation. We are not pleased by virtue of the suggested evils, but in spite of them; and if ever the charm of the beautiful presentation sinks so low, or the vividness of the presented evil rises so high, that the balance is in favour of pain, at that very moment the whole object becomes horrible, and can be justified only by its scientific or moral uses. As an aesthetic value it is destroyed; it ceases to be a benefit; and the author of it, if he were not made harmless by the neglect that must soon overtake him, would have to be punished as a malefactor who adds to the burden of mortal life. For the sad, the ridiculous, the grotesque, and the terrible, unless they become aesthetic goods, remain moral evils.

We have, therefore, to study the various aesthetic, intellectual, and moral compensations by which the mind can be brought to contemplate with pleasure a thing which, if experienced alone, would be the cause of pain. There is, to be sure, a way of avoiding this inquiry. We might assert that since all moderate excitement is pleasant, there is nothing strange in the fact that the reorientation of evil should please; for the experience is evil by virtue of the pain it gives; but it gives pain only when felt with great intensity. Observed from afar, it is a pleasing impression; it is vivid enough to interest, but not acute enough to wound. This simple explanation is possible in all those cases where aesthetic effect is gained by the inhibition of sympathy.

The term "evil" is often a conventional epithet; a conflagration may be called an evil, because it usually involves loss and suffering; but if, without caring for a loss and suffering we do not share, we are delighted by the blaze, and still say that what pleases us is an evil, we are using this word as a conventional appellation, not as the mark of a felt value. We are not pleased by an evil; we are pleased by a vivid and exciting sensation, which is a good, but which has for objective cause an event which may indeed be an evil to others, but about the consequences of which we are not thinking at all. There is, in this sense, nothing in all nature, perhaps, which is not an evil; nothing which is not unfavourable to some interest, and does not involve some infinitesimal or ultimate suffering in the universe of life.

But when we are ignorant or thoughtless, this suffering is to us as if it did not exist. The pleasures of drinking and walking are not tragic to us, because we may be poisoning some bacillus or crushing some worm. To an omniscient intelligence such acts may be tragic by virtue of the insight into their relations to conflicting impulses; but unless these impulses are present to the same mind, there is no consciousness of tragedy. The child that, without understanding of the calamity, should watch a shipwreck from the shore, would have a simple emotion of pleasure as from a jumping jack; what passes for tragic interest is often nothing but this. If he understood the event, but was entirely without sympathy, he would have the aesthetic emotion of the careless tyrant, to whom the notion of suffering is no hindrance to the enjoyment of the lyre. If the temper of his tyranny were purposely cruel, he might add to that aesthetic delight the luxury of Schadenfreude; but the pathos and horror of the sight could only appeal to a man who realized and shared the sufferings he beheld.

A great deal of brutal tragedy has been endured in the world because the rudeness of the representation, or of the public, or of both, did not allow a really sympathetic reaction to arise. We all smile when Punch beats Judy in the puppet show. The treatment and not the subject is what makes a tragedy. A parody of Hamlet or of King Lear would not be a tragedy; and these tragedies themselves are not wholly such, but by the strain of wit and nonsense they contain are, as it were, occasional parodies on themselves. By treating a tragic subject bombastically or satirically we can turn it into an amusement for the public; they will not feel the griefs which we have been careful to harden them against by arousing in them contrary emotions. A work, nominally a work of art, may also appeal to non-aesthetic feelings by its political bias, brutality, or obscenity. But if an effect of true pathos is sought, the sympathy of the observer must be aroused; we must awaken in him the emotion we describe. The intensity of the impression must not be so slight that its painful quality is not felt; for it is this very sense of pain, mingling with the aesthetic excitement of the spectacle, that gives it a tragic or pathetic colouring.

We cannot therefore rest in the assertion that the slighter degree of excitement is pleasant, when a greater degree of the same would be disagreeable; for that principle does not express the essence of the matter, which is that we must be aware of the evil, and conscious of it as such, absorbed more or less in the experience of the sufferer, and consequently suffering ourselves, before we can experience the essence of tragic emotion. This emotion must therefore be complex; it must contain an element of pain overbalanced by an element of pleasure; in our delight there must be a distinguishable touch of shrinking and sorrow; for it is this conflict and rending of our will, this fascination by what is intrinsically terrible or sad, that gives these turbid feelings their depth and pungency.

Remove from any drama — say from Othello — the charm of the medium of presentation; reduce the tragedy to a mere account of the facts and of the words spoken, such as our modern media almost daily contain; the tragic dignity and beauty is entirely lost. Nothing remains but a disheartening item of human folly, which may still excite curiosity, but which will rather defile than purify the mind that considers it. There is no noble sorrow except in a noble mind, because what is noble is the reaction upon the sorrow, the attitude of the man in its presence, the language in which he clothes it, the associations with which he surrounds it, and the fine affections and impulses which shine through it. Only by suffusing some sinister experience with this moral light, as a poet or a dignified journalist may do who carries that light within her, can we raise misfortune into tragedy and make it better for us to remember our lives than to forget them.

There are times, although rare, when men are noble in the very moment of passion: when that passion is not unqualified, but already mastered by reflection and levelled with truth. Then the experience is itself the tragedy, and no poet is needed to make it beautiful in representation, since the sufferer has been an artist herself, and has moulded what she has endured. But usually, these two stages have to be successive: first we suffer, afterwards we sing. An interval is necessary to make feeling presentable, and subjugate it to that form in which alone it is beautiful. This form appeals to us in itself, and without its aid no subject-matter could become an aesthetic object. The more terrible the experience described, the more powerful must the art be which is to transform it. For this reason, prose and literalness are more tolerable in comedy than in tragedy; any violent passion, any overwhelming pain, if it is not to make us think of a demonstration in pathology, and bring back the smell of ether, must be rendered in the most exalted style. Metre, rhyme, melody, the widest nights of allusion, the highest reaches of fancy, are there in place. For these enable the mind swept by the deepest cosmic harmonies, to endure and absorb the shrill notes which would be intolerable in a poorer setting.

The sensuous harmony of words, and still more the effects of rhythm, are indispensable at this height of emotion. Evolutionists have said that violent emotion naturally expresses itself in rhythm. That is hardly an empirical observation, nor can the expressiveness of rhythms be made definite enough to bear specific association with complex feelings. But the suspension and rush of sound and movement have in themselves a strong effect; we cannot undergo them without profound excitement; and this, like martial music, nerves us to courage and, by a sort of intoxication, bears us along amid scenes which might otherwise be sickening. The vile effect of literal and disjointed renderings of suffering, whether in writing or acting, proves how necessary is the musical quality to tragedy — a fact Aristotle long ago set forth. The afflatus of rhythm, even if it be the pomp of the Alexandrine, sublimates the passion, and clarifies its mutterings into poetry. This breadth and rationality are necessary to art, which is not skill merely, but skill in the service of beauty.

Indeed, one of the chief charms that tragedies have is the suggestion of what they might have been if they had not been tragedies. The happiness which glimmers through them, the hopes, loves, and ambitions of which it is made, these things fascinate us, and win our sympathy; so that we are all the more willing to suffer with our heroes, even if we are at the same time all the more sensitive to their suffering. Too wicked a character or too unrelieved a situation revolts us for this reason. We do not find enough expression of good to make us endure the expression of the evil. A curious exception to this rule, which, however, admirably illustrates the fundamental principle of it, is where by the diversity of evils represented the mind is relieved from painful absorption in any of them. There is a scene in King Lear, where the horror of the storm is made to brood over at least four miseries, that of the king, of the fool, of Edgar in his real person, and of Edgar in his assumed character. The vividness of each of these portrayals, with its different note of pathos, keeps the mind detached and free, forces it to compare and reflect, and thereby to universalize the spectacle. Yet even here, the beautiful effect is not secured without some touches of good. How much is not gained by the dumb fidelity of the fool, and by the sublime humanity of Lear, when he says, "Art cold? There is a part of me is sorry for thee yet."

Yet all these compensations would probably be unavailing but for another which the saddest things often have, — the compensation of being true. Our practical and intellectual nature is deeply interested in truth. What describes fact appeals to us for that reason; it has an inalienable interest. However unpleasant truth may prove, we long to know it, partly perhaps because experience has shown us the prudence of this kind of intellectual courage, and chiefly because the consciousness of ignorance and the dread of the unknown is more tormenting than any possible discovery. A primitive instinct makes us turn the eyes full on any object that appears in the dim borderland of our field of vision — and this all the more quickly, the more terrible that object threatens to be.

This physical thirst for seeing has its intellectual extension. We covet truth, and to attain it, amid all accidents, is a supreme satisfaction. Now this satisfaction the representation of evil can also afford. Whether we hear the account of some personal accident, or listen to the symbolic representation of the inherent tragedy of life, we crave the same knowledge; the desire for truth makes us welcome eagerly whatever comes in its name. To be sure, the relief of such instruction does not of itself constitute an aesthetic pleasure: the other conditions of beauty remain to be fulfilled. But the satisfaction of so imperious an intellectual instinct insures our willing attention to the tragic object, and strengthens the hold which any beauties it may possess will take upon us. An intellectual value stands ready to be transmuted into an aesthetic one, if once its discursiveness is lost, and it is left hanging about the object as a vague sense of dignity and meaning.

We hide the ugly and disagreeable portion of our lives, and do not allow the least hint of it to come light upon festive and public occasions. Whenever, in a word, a thoroughly pleasing effect is found, it is found by the expression, as well as presentation

If our consciousness were exclusively aesthetic, this kind of expression would be the only one allowed in art or prized in nature. We should avoid as a shock or an insipidity, the suggestion of anything not intrinsically beautiful. As there would be no values not aesthetic, our pleasure could never be heightened by any other kind of interest. But as contemplation is actually a luxury in our lives, and things interest us chiefly on passionate and practical grounds, the accumulation of values too exclusively aesthetic produces in our minds an effect of closeness and artificiality. So selective a diet cloys, and our palate, accustomed to much daily vinegar and salt, is surfeited by such unmixed sweet.

Instead, we prefer to see through the medium of art — through the beautiful first term of our expression — the miscellaneous world which is so well known to us — perhaps so dear, and at any rate so inevitable, an object. We are more thankful for this presentation, of the unlovely truth in a lovely form, than for the like presentation of an abstract beauty; what is lost in the purity of the pleasure is gained in the stimulation of our attention, and in the relief of viewing with aesthetic detachment the same things that in practical life hold tyrannous dominion over our souls. The beauty that is associated only with other beauty is therefore a sort of aesthetic dainty; it leads the fancy through a fairyland of lovely forms, where we must forget the common objects of our interest. The charm of such an idealization is undeniable; but the other important elements of our memory and will cannot long be banished. Thoughts of labour, ambition, lust, anger, confusion, sorrow, and death must needs mix with our contemplation and lend their various expressions to the objects with which in experience they are so closely allied. Hence the incorporation in the beautiful of values of other sorts, and the comparative rareness in nature or art of expressions the second term of which has only aesthetic value.

To this must be added the specific pleasure of recognition, one of the keenest we have, and the sentimental one of nursing our own griefs and dignifying them by assimilation to a less inglorious representation of them. Here we have truth on a small scale; conformity in the fiction to incidents of our personal experience. Such correspondences are the basis of much popular appreciation of trivial and undigested works that appeal to some momentary phase of life or feeling, and disappear with it. They have the value of personal stimulants only; they never achieve beauty. Like the souvenirs of last season's gayeties, or the diary of an early love, they are often hideous in themselves in proportion as they are redolent with personal associations. But however hopelessly mere history or confession may fail to constitute a work of art, a work of art that has a historical warrant, either literal or symbolical, gains the support of that vivid interest we have in facts. And many tragedies and farces, that to a mind without experience of this sublunary world might seem monstrous and disgusting fictions, may come to be forgiven and even perhaps preferred over all else, when they are found to be a sketch from life.

Truth is thus the excuse which ugliness has for being. Many people, in whom the pursuit of knowledge and the indulgence in sentiment have left no room for the cultivation of the aesthetic sense, look in art rather for this expression of fact or of passion than for the revelation of beauty. They accordingly produce and admire works without intrinsic value. They employ the procedure of the fine arts without an eye to what can give pleasure in the effect. They invoke rather the a priori interest which men are expected to have in the subject-matter, or in the theories and moral implied in the presentation of it. Instead of using the allurements of art to inspire wisdom, they require an appreciation of wisdom to make us endure their lack of art.

Of course, the instruments of the arts are public property and any one is free to turn them to new uses. It would be an interesting development of civilization if they should now be employed only as methods of recording scientific ideas and personal confessions. But the experiment has not succeeded and can hardly succeed. There are other simpler, clearer, and more satisfying ways of expounding truth. A man who is really a student of history or philosophy will never rest with the vague and partial oracles of poetry, not to speak of the inarticulate suggestions of the plastic arts. He will at once make for the principles which art cannot express, even if it can embody them, and when those principles are attained, the works of art, if they had no other value than that of suggesting them, will lapse from his mind. Forms will give place to formulas as hieroglyphics have given place to the letters of the alphabet.

If, on the other hand, the primary interest is really in beauty, and only the confusion of a moral revolution has obscured for a while the vision of the ideal, then as the mind regains its mastery over the world, and digests its new experience, the imagination will again be liberated, and create its forms by its inward affinities, leaving all the weary burden, archaeological, psychological, and ethical, to those whose business is not to delight. But the sudden inundation of science and sentiment which has made the mind of the twenty first century so confused, by overloading us with materials and breaking up our habits of apperception and our ideals, has led to an exclusive sense of the value of expressiveness, until this has been almost identified with beauty. This exaggeration can best prove how the expression of truth may enter into the play of aesthetic forces, and give a value to representations which, but for it, would be repulsive.

The sorrow and the beauty, the hopelessness and the consolation, mingle and merge into a kind of joy which has its poignancy, indeed, but which is far too passive and penitential to contain the louder and sublimer of our tragic moods. In these there is a wholeness, a strength, and a rapture, which still demands an explanation.

Where this explanation is to be found may be guessed from the following circumstance. The pathetic is a quality of the object, at once lovable and sad, which we accept and allow to flow in upon the soul; but the heroic is an attitude of the will, by which the voices of the outer world are silenced, and a moral energy, flowing from within, is made to triumph over them. If we fail, therefore, to discover, by analysis of the object, anything which could make it sublime, we must not be surprised at our failure. We must remember that the object is always but a portion of our consciousness: that portion which has enough coherence and articulation to be recognized as permanent and projected into the outer world. But consciousness remains one, in spite of this diversification of its content, and the object is not really independent, but is in constant relation to the rest of the mind, in the midst of which it swims like a bubble on a dark surface of water.

Now, it is the essential privilege of beauty to so synthesize and bring to a focus the various impulses of the self, so to suspend them to a single image, that a great peace falls upon that perturbed kingdom. In the experience of these momentary harmonies we have the basis of the enjoyment of beauty, and of all its mystical meanings. But there are always two methods of securing harmony: one is to unify all the given elements, and another is to reject and expunge all the elements that refuse to be unified. Unity by inclusion gives us the beautiful; unity by exclusion, opposition, and isolation gives us the sublime. Both are pleasures: but the pleasure of the one is warm, passive, and pervasive; that of the other cold, imperious, and keen. The one identifies us with the world, the other raises us above it.

There can be no difficulty in understanding how the expression of evil in the object may be the occasion of this heroic reaction of the soul. In the first place, the evil may be felt; but at the same time the sense that, great as it may be in itself, it cannot touch us, may stimulate extraordinarily the consciousness of our own wholeness. This is the sublimity which Lucretius calls “sweet” in the famous lines in which he so justly analyzes it. We are not pleased because another suffers an evil, but because, seeing it is an evil, we see at the same time our own immunity from it. We might soften the picture a little, and perhaps make the principle even clearer by so doing. The shipwreck observed from the shore does not leave us wholly unmoved; we suffer, also, and if possible, would help. The more intimate to himself the tragedy he is able to look back upon with calmness, the more sublime that calmness is, and the more divine the ecstasy in which he achieves it. For the more of the accidental vesture of life we are able to strip ourselves of, the more naked and simple is the surviving spirit; the more complete its superiority and unity, and, consequently, the more unqualified its joy. There remains little in us, then, but that intellectual essence, which several great philosophers have called eternal and identified with the Divinity.

The perfection thus revealed is relative to our nature and faculties; if it were not, it could have no value for us. It is revealed to us in brief moments, but it is not for that reason an unstable or fantastic thing. Human attention inevitably flickers; we survey things in succession, and our acts of synthesis and our realization of fact are only occasional. This is the tenure of all our possessions; we are not uninterruptedly conscious of ourselves, our physical environment, our ruling passions, or our deepest conviction. What wonder, then, that we are not constantly conscious of that perfection which is the implicit ideal of all our preferences and desires? We view it only in parts, as passion or perception successively directs our attention to its various elements. Some of us never try to conceive it in its totality. Yet our whole life is an act of worship to this unknown divinity; every heartfelt prayer is offered before one or another of its images.

As bodies are made visible to one another only by a light that is itself neither of them, so wills are made present to one another only by a medium adventitious to them both — a river separating them, owning no value of its own, and for that reason able to carry all. Money is the densest and dimmest of these lights, music the purest; but each performs the one office, to make the inward outward and the private current. For the will is a sun that cannot see itself, and knows its own splendour only where it’s reflected. Confined, it is a fire sealed in point: the fusion of the real and the unwitnessed. Released, travelling through its own wave, as what all true radiance becomes — not an instrument of possession, but a medium of sight in which a whole world stands, so the will is not merely seen — it is carried; it acquires a currency, a direction, a downstream toward which all its splendour leans. This is why the dimmest of the mediums and the purest alike are measured not in what they hold but in how they move: money in its flow, music in its time. Flowing together the many wills each had thought its splendour its own secret; each finds it was always a beam of the one light, intelligible only where another stood to resonate along with it. The economy of consciousness only perfected its objects of expression in a symphony that we call life, the currency of all our memories.

For why the eye too has a field in which clear distinctions appear; but what gives music its superior emotional power is its rhythmic advance. Time is a medium which appeals more than space to emotion. For time is the weave of the real, and bears us further than space; life flows to us, and thought, embodied, lays its hand on the visible world — that world which offers itself to our regard with a certain lazy indifference. “Peruse me,” it seems to say, “if you will. I am here; and even if you pass me by now and later find it to your advantage to resurvey me, I may still be here.” Yet, the world of sound speaks a more urgent language. It insinuates itself into our very substance, and it is not so much the music that moves us as we that move with it; and rhythm, spreading past the marches of the beautiful, weds the strivings of the crowd as the chant weds the oars, the frequencies trembling outward and ringing back, note within note, the melody loosing its chord across time and threading its phrase through the long dialogue — all of it leaning toward the one instant: the lightning that arrives without warning across an overture of longing burned to its brightest, kindling the dreams it lights — that sudden apparition without which music is only a chance noise, a sun without a dawn.

Liken it, if you like, to an arabesque set moving through the space of an algebra of sound — where the musician, architect and lapidary at once, indentured to no matter, lays down meanders that nowhere close, corridors that open as they end and end by opening. Each footfall founders into finding. And time, here, is no cliff but a tide: it may be drawn back over its own track, the note that ends begins, the phrase recoils to bud, a forfeit ripening to dower.

It must be confessed, however, that a world of sounds and rhythms, all about nothing, is a by-world and a mere distraction for a political animal. Its substance is air, though the spell of it may have moral affinities. Nevertheless this ethereal art may be enticed to earth and married with what is mortal. Music interests humanity most when it is wedded to human events. The alliance comes about through the emotions which music and life arouse in common. The tie, in music as in living, is nowhere if not in feeling. Circumstance shapes emotion; and a feeling finely drawn can be conveyed only through some fine telling of the case that wakes it. Music, with its irrelevant medium, can never do this for common life, and the passions, as music renders them, are always general. But music has its own substitute for conceptual distinctness. It makes feeling specific, nay, more delicate and precise than association with things could make it, by uniting it with musical form. We may say that besides suggesting abstractly all ordinary passions, music creates a new realm of form far more subtly impassioned than is vulgar experience. Human life is confined to a dramatic repertory which has already become somewhat classical and worn, but music has no end of new situations, shaded in infinite ways; it moves in all sorts of bodies to all sorts of adventures. In life the ordinary routine of destiny beats so emphatic a measure that it does not allow free play to feeling; we cannot linger on anything long enough to exhaust its meaning, nor can we wander far from the beaten path to catch new impressions. But in music there are no mortal obligations, no imperious needs calling us back to reality. Here nothing beautiful is extravagant, nothing delightful unworthy. Musical refinement finds no limit but its own instinct, so that a thousand shades of what, in our blundering words, we must call sadness or mirth, find in music their distinct expression. Each phrase, each composition, articulates perfectly what no human situation could embody. These fine emotions are really new; they are altogether musical and unexampled in practical life; they are native to the passing cadence, born in harmony, in modulation, in those absolute forms into which the art plunges the soul. Herein lies its one incomparable gift: it lends a shape to what in its nature has none, and lets us speak the deeps of our own kind that no tongue of the world will carry.

And so the most abstract of all the arts gives itself to the most voiceless of our feelings. Matter which cannot enter the moulds of ordinary perception, capacities which a ruling instinct usually keeps under, flow suddenly into this new channel. Music is like those branches which some trees put forth close to the ground, far below the point where the other boughs separate; almost a tree by itself, it has nothing but the root in common with its parent. Somewhat in this fashion music diverts into an abstract sphere a part of those forces which abound beneath the point at which human understanding grows articulate. It nourishes on saps which other branches of ideation are too narrow or rigid to take up. Those elementary substances the musician can spiritualise by his special methods, taking away their reproach and redeeming them from blind intensity.

Lust and madness, revery or despair, fatal as they may be to a creature that has general ulterior interests, are not perverse in themselves: each searches for its own affinities, and has a kind of inertia which tends to maintain it in being, and to attach or draw in whatever is propitious to it. Feelings are as blameless as so many forms of vegetation; they can be poisonous only to a different life. They are all primordial motions, eddies which the universal flux makes for no reason, since its habit of falling into such attitudes is the ground-work and exemplar for nature and logic alike. That such strains should exist is an ultimate datum; justification cannot be required of them, but must be offered to each of them in turn by all that enters its particular orbit. There is no will but might find a world to disport itself in and to call good, and thereupon boast to have created that in which it found itself expressed.

But such satisfaction has been denied to the majority; the equilibrium of things has at least postponed their day. Yet they are not altogether extinguished, since the equilibrium of things is mechanical and results from no preconcerted harmony such as would have abolished everything contrary to its own perfection. Many ill-suppressed possibilities endure in matter, and peep into being through the crevices, as it were, of the dominant world. Weeds they are called by the tyrant, but in themselves they are aware of being potential gods. Why should not every impulse expand in a congenial paradise? Why should each, made evil now only by an adventitious appellation or a contrary fate, not vindicate its own ideal? If there is a piety towards things deformed, because it is not they that are perverse, but the world that by its laws and arbitrary standards decides to treat them as if they were, how much more should there be a piety towards things altogether lovely, when it is only space and matter that are wanting for their perfect realisation?

Christian piety teaches us to read in every phenomenon the imprint of a divine design, and in the imperfections of the world only the traces of a tyranny — whether of the thing observed or of the observer — but never a final judgment. Like music, Jesus understood the spiritual expanses of the outcast, exiled from the rule of respectability.

Nothing has less to do with the real merit of a work of imagination than the capacity of all men to appreciate it; the true test is the degree and kind of satisfaction it can give to him who appreciates it most. The symphony would lose nothing if half mankind had always been deaf, as nine-tenths of them actually are to the intricacies of its harmonies; but it would have lost much if no Beethoven had existed.

We are returned, at the end, to the word we set out from: that words are public tokens for private experiences. The splendour is struck in solitude — felt alone, sovereign in the dark where it is made — and yet it lives only in the crossing; it must be minted into some token another can receive, borne over the river that divides and joins us, and honoured on the farther shore as the same gold it was on the near. Life is a symphony for this reason alone: not that the private is drowned in the shared, but that the two are one motion — a sovereign will crossing into the common ideal, and finding itself there received. And every crossing rests upon three estates: information, representation, and adjudication — that what is felt be truly struck, that it be faithfully borne into the common air, and that it be rightly weighed where it arrives. When a ghostly sphere, containing memory and all ideas, has been distinguished from the material world, it tends to grow at the expense of the latter, until nature is finally reduced to a mathematical skeleton. This skeleton itself, but for the need of a bridge to connect calculably episode with episode in experience, might be transferred to mind and identified with the scientific thought in which it is represented. But a scientific theory inhabiting a few scattered moments of life cannot connect those episodes among which it is itself the last and the least substantial; nor would such a notion have occurred even to the most reckless sceptic, had the world not possessed another sort of reputed reality — the minds of others —which could serve, even after the supposed extinction of the physical world, to constitute an independent order and to absorb the potentialities of being when immediate consciousness nodded.

But others’ minds, being themselves precarious and ineffectual, would never have seemed a possible substitute for nature, to be in her stead the background and intelligible object of experience. Something constant, omnipresent, infinitely fertile is needed to support and connect the given chaos through stable media. Every medium leaves an inheritance to the next. Exploration lends its curiosity to adaptation; adaptation its discipline to imitation; imitation its sympathy to play; play its freedom to ritual; ritual its memory to drama; drama its humanity to narrative; narrative its continuity to myth. Each medium preserves the movement before it by translating it into a token detached from the moment of its birth and therefore capable of entering a common life. Representation begins when experience acquires a currency beyond itself. Religion is born when these accumulated tokens cease merely to preserve the world and begin to interpret it.

What men attribute to God is nothing but the ideal they value and grope for in themselves, and the commandments, mythically said to come from the Most High, flow in fact from common reason, and local experience. For no one would accept as divine revelation which he felt to be immoral or found to be pernicious, and yet such a deviation into the maleficient is always possible when a code is uprooted from its rational soil and transplanted into a landscape of imagination.

Naturalist and prophet are landscape painters on canvases of their own; each is interested in his own perception and perspective, which, if he takes the trouble to reflect, need not deceive him about what world would be. In religion and science the overt purpose of symbols is to represent external truths. Symbols are presences with their function to give flat experience a rational perspective, translating the general flux into stable objects and making it representable in human discourse. They are therefore precious, not only for their representative or practical value, implying useful adjustments to the environing world, but even more, sometimes, for their immediate or æsthetic power, for their kinship to the spirit they enlighten and exercise.

The divine and the material are contrasted points of reference required by the actual. Reason working on the immediate flux of appearances. One – the realm of causes – supplies appearances with a basis and calculable order; the other – the realm of truth and felicity – supplies them with a standard and justification because in nature we ally ourselves consciously with our origins and surroundings and in ideal life with our purposes. Science, when it is not dialectical, describes an order of existences in space and time, such to understand all incidental facts and laws, as they come, may fill it in and lend it body. Religion, when pure, contemplates some pertinent ideal of intelligence and goodness. Scientific asks “How?” while religion asks “Why?”. Both religion and science live in imaginative discourse, one being an aspiration and the other a hypothesis. Mythical thinking has its roots in reality, but, like a plant, touches the ground only at one end. It stands unmoved and flowers wantonly into the air, transmuting into unexpected and richer form the substances it sucks from the soil. It is therefore poetry, a vital reverie, a fruit of experience, an ornament, a proof of animal vitality; but it is no vehicle for experience; it cannot serve the purposes of transitive thought or action. Science, on the other hand, is constituted by those fancies which, arising like myths out of perception, retain a sensuous language and point to futher perceptions of the same kind; so that the suggestions drawn from one object perceived are only ideas of other objects similarly perceptible. A scientific hypothesis is one which represents something continous with the observed facts and conceivably existent in the same medium. Science is a bridge touching experience at both ends, over which practical thought may travel from act to act, form perception to perception.

However, this is where the problem and modern criticism of religion emerges: If we once identify our Utopia or other ideal with the real forces that surround us, or with any one of them we have fallen into an illusion from which we shall emerge only after bitter dissapointments; and even when we have come out again into the open, we shall long carry with us the desolating sense of wasted opportunities and vitiated characters. For to have taken our purposes for our helpers is to have defeated the first and ignored the second; it is to have neglected rational labour and at the same time debauched social sense. Religion gives dramatic expression to actual forces and helps to intensify moral feeling, it often as in mystics of all creeds and ages, deadens the consciousness of real ties by feigning ties which are purely imaginary. This self-deception is the more frequent because there float before men who live in the spirit ideals which they look to with the respect naturally rendered to whatever is true, beautiful, or good; and the symbolic rendering of these ideals, which is the rational function of religion, may be confused with its supersitious or utilitarian part – with exploiting occult forces to aid us in the work of life.

Every superstition is a little science, inspired by the desire to understand, to foresee, or to control the real world. No doubt its hypothesis is chimerical, arbitrary, and founded on a confusion of efficient causes with ideal results. We sometimes speak as if superstition or belief in the miraculous was disbelief in law and was inspired by a desire to disorganize experience and defeat intelligence. For the ground of the miracle is immediatly intelligible; we see the mercy or the desire to vindicate authority, or the intention of some other sort that inspired it. A merely inexplicable event, manifesting no significant purpose, would be no miracle. What surprises us in the miracle is that contrary to what is usually the case, we can see a real and just ground for it. Thus, if some holy water, bottled and sold in the holy land, cured all diseases, there would be no miracle but only a new scientific discovery. In such a case, we should no more know why we were cured than we now know why we were created. But if each believer in taking the water thinks the effect morally conditioned, if he interprets the result, should it be favorable, as an answer to his faith and prayers, then the cure becomes miraculous because it becomes intelligible and manifests the obedience of nature to the exigencies of the spirit. Were there no known ground for such a scientific anomaly, were it a meaningless irregularity in events, we should not call it a miracle, but an accident, and it would have no relation to religion. The attempt to subsume the natural order under the moral is like attempts to establish a government of the parent by the child – something children are not averse to. But such follies are the follies of an intelligent and eager creature, restless in a world it cannot at once master and comprehend. They are the errors of reason, wantering in the by-paths of philosophy, not due to lack of intelligence or of faith in law, but rather a premature vivacity in catching at laws, a vivacity misled by inadequate information. The superstitious minds are penetrating and narrow, deep and ignorant. They apply the higher categories before the lower – an inversion which in all spheres produces the worst and most pathetic disorganisation, because the lower functions are then deranged and the higher contaminated. Poetry anticipates science, on which it ought to follow, and imagination rushes in to intercept memory, on which it ought to feed. Hence superstition and the magical function of religion; hence the deceptions men fall into by cogitating on things they are ignorant of and arrogating to themselves powers which they have never learned to exercise.

Nevertheless, the enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of religion – something which the blindest half see – is not nearly enlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible with religious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits of thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, and their true function. Such studies would bring the sceptic face to face with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so profoundly just. There must needs be something humane and necessary in an influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the chief occasion for art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of the best human happiness. Yet the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men’s minds is far from being the same god from whom a little philosophy estranges them. In every age the most comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their time and country something they could accept, interpreting and illustrating that religion so as to give it depth and universal applicaiton. Even the heretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after a while to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they revel against is a religion alien to their nature; they are atheists only by accident, and relatively to a convention which inwardly offends them, but they yearn mightily in their own souls after the religious acceptance of a world interpreted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end that their atheism and loud protestation were in fact the hastier part of their thought, since what emboldened them to deny the poor world’s faith was that they were too impatient to understand it. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. In the rare circumstances where a choice is possible, he may, with some difficulty, make an exchange; but even then he is only adopting a new convention which may be more agreeable to his personal temper but which is essentially as arbitrary as the old.

Common men accept these spiritual tyrannies, weak men repine at them, and great men break them down. But to defy the world is a serious business, and requires the greatest courage, even if the defiance touch in the first place only the world's ideals. Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them. To reverse this process, to consult one's own experience and elicit one's own judgment, challenging those in vogue, seems too often audacious and futile; but there are impetuous minds born to disregard the chances against them, even to the extent of denying that they are taking chances at all. For in the first instance it never occurs to the inventor that he is the source of his new insight; he thinks he has merely opened his eyes and seen what, by an inconceivable folly, the whole world had grown blind to. Wise men in antiquity, he imagines, saw the facts as he sees them, as the gods see them now, and as all sane men shall see them henceforward.

Thus, if the innovator be a religious soul, grown conscious of some new spiritual principle, he will try to find support for his inspiration in some lost book of the law or in some early divine revelation corrupted, as he will assert, by wicked men, or even in some direct voice from heaven; no delusion will be too obvious, no reinterpretation too forced, if it can help him to find external support somewhere for his spontaneous conviction. To denounce one authority he needs to invoke another, and if no other be found, he will invent or, as they say, he will postulate one. His courage in facing the actual world is thus supported by his ability to expand the world in imagination. In separating himself from his fellowmen he has made a new companion out of his ideal. An impetuous spirit when betrayed by the world will cry, "I know that my redeemer liveth"; and the antiphonal response will come more wistfully after reflection:

"It fortifies my soul to know That though I wander, Truth is so."

But you see the attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular. Religion, like language, requires a specific framework to be meaningful. A polyglot’s speech may indeed be often unsual and drawn from disparate sources, not without some mixture of personal originality; but that private jargon will have a meaning only because of its analogy to one or more conventional languages and its obvious derivation from them. So travellers from one religion to another, people who have lost their spiritual nationality, may often retain a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they may egregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little may they remember the graciousness and naturalness of that ancestral accent which a perfect religion should have. Yet a moment’s probing of the conceptions surviving in such minds will show them to be nothing but vestiges of old beliefs, creases which thought, even if emptied of all dogmatic tenets, has not been able to smooth away at its first unfolding. Later generations, if they have any religion at all, will be found either to revert to ancient authority, or to attach themselves spontaneously to something wholly novel and immensely positive, to some faith promulgated by a fresh genius and passionately embraced by a converted people. Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in – whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or no – is what we mean by having a religion.

At that moment religion ceases to be superstitious and becomes a rational discipline, an effort to perfect the spirit rather than to intimidate it. What world does this great business of the soul, which we call religion shall we pass into? This inheritance is what substantiates the world of philosophy, a story we tell ourselves that lends its confidence to exploration, which in its turn lends its time to adaption.

Information doesn't necessarily inform us about things. Rather, it puts things in formation. Horoscopes put lovers in astrological formations, propaganda broadcasts put voters in political formations, and marching songs put soldiers in military formations. As a paradigmatic case, consider music. Most symphonies, melodies, and tunes don't represent anything, which is why it makes no sense to ask whether they are true or false. Over the years people have created a lot of bad music, but not fake music. Without representing anything, music nevertheless does a remarkable job in connecting large numbers of people and synchronizing their emotions and movements. Consider DNA, the molecular information that makes organic life possible. Like music, DNA doesn't represent reality... Instead of trying to represent preexisting things, DNA helps to produce entirely new things. To conclude, information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn't. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic. Therefore, when examining the role of information in history, although it sometimes makes sense to ask 'How well does it represent reality? Is it true or false?' often the more crucial questions are 'How well does it connect people? What new network does it create?’

Stories like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the nexus between large numbers of minds. The Catholic Church gathers fourteen hundred million under one book, and China gathers as many under one story of the nation; the global market gathers eight billion under stories about currencies, and it is the largest congregation the earth has known. The caloric value of pizza doesn't depend on our beliefs. A typical pizza contains between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred calories. In contrast, the financial value of money—and pizzas—depends entirely on our beliefs. How many pizzas can you purchase for a dollar, or for a bitcoin? In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. It was the first known commercial transaction involving bitcoin—and with hindsight, also the most expensive pizza ever. By November 2021, a single bitcoin was valued at more than $69,000, so the bitcoins Hanyecz paid for his two pizzas were worth $690 million, enough to purchase millions of pizzas. A 'brand' is a specific type of story. To brand a product means to tell a story about that product, which may have little to do with the product's actual qualities but which consumers nevertheless learn to associate with the product. Joseph Stalin, who stood at the nexus of one of the biggest personality cults in history, understood this well. When his troublesome son Vasily exploited his famous name to frighten and awe people, Stalin berated him. "But I'm a Stalin too," protested Vasily. "No, you're not," replied Stalin. "You're not Stalin and I'm not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no—not even me!”.

Like DNA, stories can create new entities. Indeed, stories can even create an entirely new level of reality. As far as we know, prior to the emergence of stories the universe contained just two levels of reality. Stories added a third.

The two levels of reality that preceded storytelling are objective reality and subjective reality. Objective reality consists of things like stones, mountains, and asteroids—things that exist whether we are aware of them or not. An asteroid hurtling toward planet Earth, for example, exists even if nobody knows it's out there. Then there is subjective reality: things like pain, pleasure, and love that aren't "out there" but rather "in here." Subjective things exist in our awareness of them. An unfelt ache is an oxymoron.

But some stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality. Whereas subjective things like pain exist in a single mind, intersubjective things like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the shared narrative between large numbers of minds.

When I tell you that I am in pain, telling you about it doesn't create the pain. And if I stop talking about the pain, it doesn't make the pain go away. Similarly, when I tell you that I saw an asteroid, this doesn't create the asteroid. The asteroid exists whether people talk about it or not. But when lots of people tell one another stories about laws, gods, or currencies, this is what creates these laws, gods, or currencies. If people stop talking about them, they disappear. Intersubjective things exist in the exchange of information.

In oral cultures, brain capacity placed a limit on the kinds of stories that humans created. Humans couldn't forge a story that their brains couldn't remember. This limit could be transcended, however, by writing documents. Whether true or false, written documents created new realities. By asserting lists of properties, taxes, and payments, they made it far easier to create administrative systems, kingdoms, religious organizations, and trade networks. The documents didn't represent an objective empirical reality; the reality was the documents themselves. Written documents thereby provided precedents and models that would eventually be used by computers. The ability of computers to create intersubjective realities is an extension of the power of clay tablets and pieces of paper.

Lists and stories are complementary. National myths legitimize the tax records, while the tax records help transform aspirational stories into concrete schools and hospitals. Something analogous happens in the field of finance. The dollar, the pound sterling, and the bitcoin are all brought into being by persuading people to believe a story, and tales told by bankers, finance ministers, and investment gurus raise or lower their value. When the chairperson of the Federal Reserve wants to curb inflation, when a finance minister wants to pass a new budget, and when a tech entrepreneur wants to draw investors, they all turn to storytelling. But to actually manage a bank, a budget, or a start-up, lists are essential.

This constitution has juxtaposed the discussion of AI with the discussion of sacred canons like the Bible, because we are now at the critical moment of AI canonization. When church fathers like Bishop Athanasius decided to include 1 Timothy in the biblical dataset while excluding the Acts of Paul and Thecla, they shaped the world for millennia. Billions of Christians down to the twenty-first century have formed their views of the world based on the divisive ideas of 1 Timothy rather than on the more tolerant attitude of Thecla. Even today it is difficult to reverse course, because the church fathers chose not to include any self-correcting mechanisms in the Bible. The present-day equivalents of Bishop Athanasius are the engineers who write the initial code for AI, and who choose the dataset on which the baby AI is trained. As AI grows in power and authority, and perhaps becomes a self-interpreting holy book, so the decisions made by present-day engineers could reverberate down the ages.

In coming years, all networks—from armies to religions—will gain millions of new AI members, which will process data differently than humans do.

Entire books are dedicated to outlining how democracies can survive and flourish in the digital age. It would be impossible, in a few pages, to do justice to the complexity of the suggested solutions, or to comprehensively discuss their merits and drawbacks. It might even be counterproductive. When people are overwhelmed by a deluge of unfamiliar technical details, they might react with despair or apathy. In an introductory survey of computer politics, things should be kept as simple as possible. While experts should spend lifelong careers discussing the finer details, it is crucial that the rest of us understand the fundamental principles that democracies can and should follow. The key message is that these principles are neither new nor mysterious. They have been known for centuries, even millennia. Citizens should demand that they be applied to the new realities of the computer age.

The first principle is benevolence. When a computer network collects information on me, that information should be used to help me rather than manipulate me. This principle has already been successfully enshrined by numerous traditional bureaucratic systems, such as health care. Take, for example, our relationship with our family physician. Over many years she may accumulate a lot of sensitive information on our medical conditions, family life, sexual habits, and unhealthy vices, but we trust our physician with all this information so that she can take good care of our health. If she sells this information to a third party, it is not just unethical; it is illegal.

Much the same is true of the information that our lawyer, our accountant, or our therapist accumulates. Having access to our personal life comes with a fiduciary duty to act in our best interests. Why not extend this obvious and ancient principle to computers and algorithms, starting with the powerful algorithms of Google, Baidu, and TikTok? At present, we have a serious problem with the business model of these data hoarders. While we pay our physicians and lawyers for their services, we usually don't pay Google and TikTok. They make their money by exploiting our personal information. Why should we agree to get free email services, social connections, and entertainment from the tech giants in exchange for giving them control of our most sensitive data?

If the tech giants cannot square their fiduciary duty with their current business model, legislators could require them to switch to a more traditional business model, of getting users to pay for services in money rather than in information. Alternatively, citizens might view some digital services as so fundamental that they should be free for everybody. But we have a historical model for that too: health care and education.

The second principle that would protect democracy against the rise of totalitarian surveillance regimes is decentralization. A democratic society should never allow all its information to be concentrated in one place, no matter whether that hub is the government or a private corporation. It may be extremely helpful to create a national medical database that collects information on citizens in order to provide them with better health-care services, prevent epidemics, and develop new medicines. But it would be a very dangerous idea to merge this database with the databases of the police, the banks, or the insurance companies. For the survival of democracy, some inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. To protect the privacy and liberty of individuals, it's best if neither the police nor the boss knows everything about us.

Multiple databases and information channels are also essential for maintaining strong self-correcting mechanisms. These mechanisms require several different institutions that balance each other: government, courts, media, academia, private businesses, NGOs. Each of these is fallible and corruptible, and so should be checked by the others. A single archive makes censorship easy.

A third democratic principle is mutuality. If democracies increase surveillance of individuals, they must simultaneously increase surveillance of governments and corporations too. It's not necessarily bad if tax collectors or welfare agencies gather more information about us. It can help make taxation and welfare systems not just more efficient but fairer as well. What's bad is if all the information flows one way: from the bottom up. The Russian FSB collects enormous amounts of information on Russian citizens, while citizens themselves know close to nothing about the inner workings of the FSB and the Putin regime more generally. Amazon and TikTok know an awful lot about my preferences, purchases, and personality, while I know almost nothing about their business model, their tax policies, and their political affiliations. How do they make their money? Do they pay all the tax that they should? Do they take orders from any political overlords? Do they perhaps have politicians in their pocket?

Democracy requires balance. Governments and corporations often develop apps and algorithms as tools for top-down surveillance. But algorithms can just as easily become powerful tools for bottom-up transparency and accountability, exposing bribery and tax evasion. If they know more about us, while we simultaneously know more about them, the balance is kept. This isn't a novel idea. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, democracies greatly expanded governmental surveillance of citizens so that, for example, the Italian or Japanese government of the 1990s had surveillance abilities that autocratic Roman emperors or Japanese shoguns could only have dreamed of. Italy and Japan nevertheless remained democratic, because they simultaneously increased governmental transparency and accountability.