CHAPTER VI.. Life As Its Own Reward.

LIFE AS ITS OWN REWARD.

We must now examine what will be the practical result on life in general of the loss just indicated 132

To do this, we will take life as reflected in the mirror of the great dramatic art of the world 134

And this will show us how the moral judgment is the chief faculty to which all that is great or intense in this art appeals 136

We shall see this, for instance, in Macbeth 137

In Hamlet 137

In Antigone 137

In Measure for Measure, and in Faust 138

And also in degraded art just as well as in sublime art 139

In profligate and cynical art, such as Congreve's 140

And in concupiscent art 141

Such as Mademoiselle de Maupin 141

Or such works as that of Meursius, or the worst scenes in Petronius 142

The supernatural moral judgment is the chief thing everywhere 143

Take away this judgment, and art loses all its strange interest 144

And so will it be with life 145

The moral landscape will be ruined 145

Even the mere sensuous joy of living in health will grow duller 146

Nor will culture be of the least avail without the supernatural moral element 148

Nor will the devotion to truth for its own sake, which is the last refuge of the positivists when in despair 149

For this last has no meaning whatever, except as a form of concrete theism 152

The reverence for Nature is but another form of the devotion to truth, and its only possible meaning is equally theistic 157

Thus all the higher resources of positivism fail together 161

And the highest positive value of life would be something less than its present value 161