Some there
are who cannot feel the difference between the _Sonata Appassionata_,
and _Cherry Ripe_; or between a gravestone-cutter's cherub and the
Apollo Belvidere; but the canons of art are none the less acknowledged.
While some there may be, who, devoid of sympathy are incapable of a
sense of duty; but neither does their existence affect the foundations
of morality. Such pathological deviations from true manhood are merely
the halt, the lame, and the blind of the world of consciousness; and the
anatomist of the mind leaves them aside, as the anatomist of the body
would ignore abnormal specimens.
And as there are Pascals and Mozarts, Newtons and Raffaelles, in whom
the innate faculty for science or art seems to need but a touch to
spring into full vigour, and through whom the human race obtains new
possibilities of knowledge and new conceptions of beauty: so there have
been men of moral genius, to whom we owe ideals of duty and visions of
moral perfection, which ordinary mankind could never have attained;
though, happily for them, they can feel the beauty of a vision, which
lay beyond the reach of their dull imaginations, and count life well
spent in shaping some faint image of it in the actual world.
THE END
LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, BREAD STREET HILL.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] Family affection in the eighteenth century may have been stronger
than in the nineteenth; but Hume's bachelor inexperience can surely
alone explain his strange account of the suppositions of the marriage
law of that day, and their effects.
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