The Spirit of Beauty; Essays Scientific and Sthetic (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE MORAL IN NATURE. The argument for the beautiful has a parallel in that for the moral. Besides, the higher theory regards beauty as addressing our entire nature, and so finds place for moral beauty. So far from having to search widely for a moral element in nature, we are at once confronted by the revived question?is not the long struggle of existence full of remorseless cruelty and suffering? The very question gives indirect assent to a general moral aspect of things, by its readiness to see something terribly ethic in nature, on the unwelcome supposition that there is a Creator "We need not reply. Optimists of all schools have given abundant answer; and the evolutionary meliorists have done so,?for example, Sully in his book on Pessimism. Enough that no healthy mind can look abroad on nature, as it is, and not feel that happiness is the rule and suffering the brief incident of all animal life; and the consciousness, of pain in lower organisms, if not mentally absent, must be comparable only with our sensitiveness in semi-conscious states. It cannot have the full and high mental elements of our painful experiences. As to man, the longest discussion may be summed up in the words "higher pleasures, higher pains;" man is notintended to be a clam, with no liability to sin and suffering. Moreover, we view from our high stand-point, not their low one, the condition of millions who are doubtless very much at home in their circumstances, even more content than we in ours. It is worth while to make a passing remark here, that this consideration of stand-point applies to that future state of being which would come largely into view in any full discussion of the evils in our earthly life. Who shall say that any future state is not the one preferred?yes, even a projection ...