Without bitterness, and with no need for shame, we can deride the thing we most adore.

Sometimes in this mood man is regarded as a mere irrelevance; but in a shrewder vision we seem to see that man, sensitive dust that he is, has also his part to play, though not the part he thought. For even the dust is in the picture. When the bright vision is past, and we try to think out its significance, it seems indeed that the office of the human mind must be to strive toward ever clearer percipience, and to master and enrich its own imperfect nature always for the end which our fathers called worship; so that we, tiny and ineffectual players in the gods' game, may at least enter intelligently into the spirit of the game, and admire it not merely so far as it favours the ends of man, but for its own character. But we must not claim that man's discerning admiration and participation is necessary to the full achievement of the cosmos; for man's part after all may be finally tragic, and he may never fulfill his supreme office of worship. But in such experiences of dispassionate appreciation as we already know it does seem to be implied that, if man has any cosmical function whatever, it is at least to strive towards ever finer knowledge and will, whether victoriously or toward the doomed failure which is tragedy. For in this mood, though certainly we have no evidence that man will thus flower, we have strange but sure conviction that, whatever the issue, it will be the right issue, in the eyes of the gods.

But what is this talk of "gods"? For good or ill the distinctively modern spirit finds deity both improbable and unattractive. The universe that it admires, even in spite of itself, is conceived as a godless universe. Then how can there be a game, since no one is playing it? Or art, though no one creates it? How can there be any virtue in the unwitting process of things, however vast and subtly systematic? If the excellence of the universe lies neither in its expression of God's idea nor in its conformity with man's own nature, in what sense can it be excellent at all? The claim is that in certain moments of unusually clear percipience, or even through long periods or a whole life-time of vision, a man may discover in the universe, or at least in his schematic view of it, an intrinsic good not commonly revealed, an excellence not in any way dependent on the fulfilment of our purposes, or Life's capacity or even God's will. But surely this claim is meaningless; unless indeed the universe as a whole is itself alive, is an active and self-fulfilling organism. Perhaps it expresses its unconscious nature as a plant does, but with minds for flowers. Perhaps in these moments of vision we do indeed glimpse the form or the spirit of the cosmic tree which bears us. And perhaps the tragedy of our existence is but the tragedy of petals that wither when the fruit sets, not the tragedy of universal frustration. Perhaps the faith of the Romantics was right, though they could not justify it rationally and often interpreted it too simply and optimistically in the light of their romantic preconceptions. Perhaps the truth which they groped for and confused stands revealed at last in Swinburne's "Hertha."

Perhaps this, perhaps that. Only technical philosophy can ever judge the significance of that seeming insight which most of us probably experience at one time or another. But unfortunately the philosophers are still at loggerheads about it all. For it is not clear that there is any meaning whatever in saying that an object can have intrinsic value, or be intrinsically good, apart from any mind's appreciation or purpose. Yet only by such phrases can we do justice to the actual content of this ecstatic mood of appreciation. In this dilemma some incline to sacrifice logic, others to suspect the logic-defying experience. While Professor Whitehead applauds the vision of the Romantics, Mr. Bertrand Russell would probably remind us that our nervous systems are known to play strange tricks, that this judgment of the excellence of the universe may be but a projection of our own confused emotion upon a world which is itself alien to all value; or again that our admiration of an objective system which is careless of man is at heart merely enjoyment of our own supposed emancipation from prejudice, or our own skill of cognition.

The policy of explaining the more mature activities of mind in terms of the more primitive has certainly been fertile in psychology. But whenever it has definitely succeeded, the facts explained have been of the same order as the explanatory facts. In this case, however, the experience to be explained appears to be of a nature different in essence from the primitive impulses which are supposed to explain it. And the more closely it is observed, the more different it seems. For it appears to be in its very essence an interest in objectivity; and all attempts to explain it solely in terms of the enjoyment of subjective activities or of the activities of the individual organism, however complex and "sublimated," seem therefore beside the mark. Those who favour such explanations seem to their opponents unable to focus clearly the experience they would explain. They fail to distinguish in it a quality wholly absent from primitive experience, a disinterested admiration, implying detachment not merely from private desire but from the whole endeavour of humanity. This quality, so foreign to primitive mentality, and so unintelligible in terms of a psychology confined to the primitive, comes to us in the actual experience itself as the just, though scarcely rationable, response to the universe as it is revealed in our time.

There is then at least some reason to suppose that in this unique ecstasy of disinterested admiration something is apprehended which is only to be attained by an "emergent" activity of developed minds. But there remains the epistemological question about the status of value. Do such adjectives as "good" and "bad" apply in strictness only to subjective states, or do they name characters of objects? We cannot here enter into this technical discussion.