[OpenJades-developer] N life. At that moment, with his abortive and atrophied

[Grever <rat...@ad...>]

Lice is, in its inmost self, more essentially and profoundly evil. For
while the energy of sadism renders the actual destructive power of
malice much more formidable, we must remember that what really
constitutes the essence of evil is never the energy of destruction but
always the malicious inertness of resistance to creation. We have thus
arrived at some measure of insight as to the nature of art and we find
that whatever else it may be it must be penetrated through and through
by the overcoming of malice by love. It must, in other words, have the
actual outflowing of the soul as the instrument of its expression and as
the psycho-material medium with which it inscribes its vision upon the
objective mystery that confronts it. We have at least arrived at this
point in our search for a definite criterion: that when in any work of
art a vein of excessive cruelty or, worse still, a vein of sneering and
vindictive malice, dominates the emotional atmosphere, such a work of
art, however admirable it may be in other respects, falls below the
level of the most excellent. The relation between the idea of beauty as
expressed by the aesthetic sense and those other ideas, namely of truth
and goodness, which complete the circle of human vision, is a relation
which may be suggested thus. Since all three of these primordial ideas
are unified by the emotion of love it is clear that the emotion of love
is the element in which each of them severally moves. And since it is
impossible that love should be antagonistic to itself we must conclude
that the love which is the element or substratum of beauty is the same
love that is the element or substratum of goodness and truth. And since
all these three elements are in reality one element, which is indeed
nothing less than the dominant outflowing of the soul itself, it follows
that those portions of the soul's outflowing which have been directed by
reason and by conscience, which we call the idea of truth and the idea
of goodness, must have an ultimate identity with that portion of the
soul's outflowing which has been directed by the aesthetic sense and
which we call the idea of beauty. This identity between truth and
goodness on the one hand and beauty on the other cannot be regarded as
an absolute identity. The idea of truth continues to represent one facet
of the universe, the idea of goodness anot