So far we might perhaps say that art was non-moral.  But the statement would be misleading, since, as we have seen, art is in its very origin social, and social means human and collective.  Moral and social are, in their final analysis, the same.  That human, collective emotion, out of which we have seen the choral dance arise, is in its essence moral; that is, it unites.  “Art,” says Tolstoy, “has this characteristic, that it unites people.”  In this conviction, as we shall later see, he anticipates the modern movement of the Unanimists (p. 249).

But there is another, and perhaps simpler, way in which art is moral.  As already suggested, it purifies by cutting off the motor-reactions of personal desire.  An artist deeply in love with his friend’s wife once said:  “If only I could paint her and get what I want from her, I could bear it.”  His wish strikes a chill at first; it sounds egotistic; it has the peculiar, instinctive, inevitable cruelty of the artist, seeing in human nature material for his art.  But it shows us the moral side of art.  The artist was a good and sensitive man; he saw the misery he had brought and would bring to people he loved, and he saw, or rather felt, a way of escape; he saw that through art, through vision, through detachment, desire might be slain, and the man within him find peace.  To some natures this instinct after art is almost their sole morality.  If they find themselves intimately entangled in hate or jealousy or even contempt, so that they are unable to see the object of their hate or jealousy or contempt in a clear, quiet and lovely light, they are restless, miserable, morally out of gear, and they are constrained to fetter or slay personal desire and so find rest.

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This aloofness, this purgation of emotion from personal passion, art has in common with philosophy.  If the philosopher will seek after truth, there must be, says Plotinus, a “turning away” of the spirit, a detachment.  He must aim at contemplation; action, he says, is “a weakening of contemplation.”  Our word theory, which we use in connection with reasoning and which comes from the same Greek root as theatre, means really looking fixedly at, contemplation; it is very near in meaning to our imagination.  But the philosopher differs from the artist in this:  he aims not only at the contemplation of truth, but at the ordering of truths, he seeks to make of the whole universe an intelligible structure.  Further, he is not driven by the gadfly of creation, he is not forced to cast his images into visible or audible shape.  He is remoter from the push of life.  Still, the philosopher, like the artist, lives in a world of his own, with a spell of its own near akin to beauty, and the secret of that spell is the same detachment from the tyranny of practical life.  The essence of art, says Santayana, is “the steady contemplation of things in their order and worth.”  He might have been defining philosophy.