Never, we suppose, was an
age in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than
this. Its philosophy has played it false. It has passed from the
nebulous Hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one would
have thought that to a generation with even a vague memory of
Aristotle's _Poetics_, the mere title, _The Philosophy of History_ would
have been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of
instinct. From one side comes the cry, 'Man _is_ a beast'; from the
other, 'Trust your instincts.' The sole manifest employment of reason is
to overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with the
imagination, the vital principle of control.
Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to our
senses, which is roughly the same thing. At all events, it is certain
that in Aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of a
remedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome the
world. It is the confusion between existence and value.
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