No doubt, a greater artist than Hearn would have printed his pages in the conventional way, and would still have made his appeal, without signposts, to the expert reader. Yet we may be grateful to him for a psychological object-lesson; he has given outward expression to a set of attitudes that we should otherwise have been obliged to seek and identify for ourselves. All the same, the attitudes would have been there, as certainly and definitely as if they had been indicated; and we could have found them, if we had ever experienced the sentiment of literary fitness. You see what enrichment of the life of feeling such a sentiment breeds, and you see how helpless we should be without it. The proverbs say _de gustibus non est disputandum_, and _quot homines tot sententiæ_, as if taste and opinion were matters of the merest chance. They are never that, however far they may lie below the level of sentiment and judgement; for there are solid uniformities of sense-feeling, and there is in every society a basal community of ideas; while, upon the higher level, they are as sure and as uniform as individual differences of talent and temperament allow. They are far more sure and far more uniform than the outsider imagines; technical discussion and technical appreciation have always a reasoned foundation of agreement. Competent critics may debate whether Whistler’s picture of his Mother or that of Miss Alexander is the greater portrait; but think how much must be agreed upon before the debate can begin! § 70. =The Forms of Sentiment.=—Emotions go in pairs; an emotion is either joy or sorrow, either hope or fear; there is no midway emotion that is something between the two, but is neither the one nor the other. The sense-feelings, too, go in pairs; a feeling is either exciting or subduing, for instance, and cannot be anything between. When, however, the situation that arouses feeling is met by us in the state of secondary attention, then there is a third possibility; and _the sentiments, in fact, run in threes_. Here is a theory: is it true or false? If we judge it true, we have the sentiment of _belief_; if we judge it false, the sentiment of _disbelief_. But we need not come to a final judgement; facts _a_, _b_, _c_, we will suppose, tell for the theory, and facts _x_, _y_, _z_ tell against it; we oscillate, uncertainly, between the two predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’; and the result is the suspensive sentiment of _doubt_. Language is an unsafe guide in these matters; partly because the same term may stand both for sentiment and for feeling-attitude, but partly also because the sentiments, being less common than emotions, have not always received specific names. In principle, nevertheless, there is in every case a third sentiment, corresponding with oscillation of judgement, between the two extremes.