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development, your motto for life, should be to maintain the integrity of your humanity. No one function should ever prevail over that final end. No isolated force can satisfy all reasonable objects of individual existence, as it cannot alone produce the ordered concert of collective existence. And like deformity or dwarfing to the body, is, to the soul, the result of an exclusive object imposed on individual action and a single manner of culture. The falsity of
    what is artificial makes ephemeral the glamour of those societies which have sacrificed the free development of their feeling or thought, whether to mercantile activity as in Phoenicia, to wars as in Sparta, to mysticism as in the terror of the millennium, or to the life of the salon and the court as in eighteenth century France. Keep yourselves clear of any mutilation of your moral nature. Shape the harmonious growth of your spirit for every noble way; remembering that the most easy, usual mutilation is that which in human life as it stands compels a man to forego this sort of inner life; where all things high and noble have their being, but, at the harsh breath of reality, bum in the fires of an impure passion or wither in the furnace of utilitarianism the life of which disinterested meditation is part, and part the thinking of ideals; that ancient otium, the impenetrable chamber of my story!
    And just as the first impulse of profanation will be directed to what is most sacred in the sanctuary, so the common deterioration I would warn you against will begin by your despising what is beautiful. Of all things of the spirit this sense is the most delicate, clear vision of the loveliness of things; and the one which most quickly withers in a life limited to the invariable round of a vulgar circle, leaving it but a treasured relic abandoned to the care of the few. The emotion for beauty is to the sentiment of other idealities as the jewel to the ring. The effect of a rude touch is as a blow and soon works its fatal work; and an absolute indifference comes to be in the average soul, where should be perfect love. No stupor of a savage in the presence of the complicated machines of civilization is more intense than the dazed wonder with which too many educated men regard acts which show the intention or the habit of conceding a serious reality to what is beautiful in life.
    The argument of the traitor apostle before the jar of ointment, spilled to no practical purpose on the Saviour’s head, is still one of the formulae of common sense. The superfluity of art is not, for the nameless crowd, worth three hundred denarii. If perchance they respect it, it is as an esoteric cult. And yet of all the elements of education that go to make up a full and noble view of life, surely none more than Art can justify our interest; for none more than it includes, as Schiller in eloquent pages sang, a culture more extensive, more complete, more fully lending itself to a concerted stimulus of all the soul's faculties. Even if the love and admiration of beauty did not answer of themselves to a lofty impulse in the rational being, had not also worth enough to be cultivated for themselves alone, it would be a motive highly moral which proposed the culture of the aesthetic sentiment as a matter of high interest for all. If to no one it is given to be without moral sentiment, its education carries with it the duty of preparing the mind for a clear vision also of what is beautiful. Believe me, an educated sense of what is beautiful is the most efficacious collaborator in the forming of a delicate sense of justice. No better instrument exists to dignify, to ennoble the mind. Never does a man more surely fulfil his duty than when he feels it, not as an imposition, but as part of a beautiful harmony. Never will he be a good man more completely than when he knows how to respect in his own work the sentiment of beauty in the others.
    Certain it is that the sanctity of goodness purifies and exalts even