What shall we say of this strangely unreal and strangely personal religion?  Is it a ghost of Calvinism, returned with none of its old force but with its old aspect of rigidity?  Perhaps:  but then, in losing its force, in abandoning its myths, and threats, and rhetoric, this religion has lost its deceptive sanctimony and hypocrisy; and in retaining its rigidity it has kept what made it noble and pathetic; for it is a clear dramatic expression of that human spirit—­in this case a most pure and heroic spirit—­which it strives so hard to dethrone.  After all, the hypostasis of the good is only an unfortunate incident in a great accomplishment, which is the discernment of the good.  I have dwelt chiefly on this incident, because in academic circles it is the abuses incidental to true philosophy that create controversy and form schools.  Artificial systems, even when they prevail, after a while fatigue their adherents, without ever having convinced or refuted their opponents, and they fade out of existence not by being refuted in their turn, but simply by a tacit agreement to ignore their claims:  so that the true insight they were based on is too often buried under them.  The hypostasis of philosophical terms is an abuse incidental to the forthright, unchecked use of the intellect; it substitutes for things the limits and distinctions that divide them.  So physics is corrupted by logic; but the logic that corrupts physics is perhaps correct, and when it is moral dialectic, it is more important than physics itself.  Mr. Russell’s ethics is ethics.  When we mortals have once assumed the moral attitude, it is certain that an indefinable value accrues to some things as opposed to others, that these things are many, that combinations of them have values not belonging to their parts, and that these valuable things are far more specific than abstract pleasure, and far more diffused than one’s personal life.  What a pity if this pure morality, in detaching itself impetuously from the earth, whose bright satellite it might be, should fly into the abyss at a tangent, and leave us as much in the dark as before!

V

SHELLEY:  OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES

It is possible to advocate anarchy in criticism as in politics, and there is perhaps nothing coercive to urge against a man who maintains that any work of art is good enough, intrinsically and incommensurably, if it pleased anybody at any time for any reason.  In practice, however, the ideal of anarchy is unstable.  Irrefutable by argument, it is readily overcome by nature.  It melts away before the dogmatic operation of the anarchist’s own will, as soon as he allows himself the least creative endeavour.  In spite of the infinite variety of what is merely possible, human nature and will have a somewhat definite constitution, and only what is harmonious with their actual constitution can long maintain itself in the moral world.  Hence it is a safe principle in the criticism of art that technical proficiency, and brilliancy of fancy or execution, cannot avail to establish a great reputation.  They may dazzle for a moment, but they cannot absolve an artist from the need of having an important subject-matter and a sane humanity.