There is another consideration which enhances still further the value of success, namely that, if the purpose of a work of art be to please, the greater will be the number of its conquests and the better this purpose will have been accomplished. Art has certainly a function, since it exists. It satisfies a need of our nature. To say that this need is, precisely, the artistic taste, is to say that a man likes coffee or tobacco because they satisfy his taste for coffee or tobacco. It is to say nothing at all--not even nonsense. It is to utter words without any meaning whatsoever. Things do not correspond with this simplicity in life--with this amiable relation of the kettle to its cover. Let us leave such explanations to the Christian philosophy of final causes. The purpose of art being to please, success is at least a first evidence in favour of the work. The idea of pleasing is very complex. We shall see later what it contains; but the word may serve us provisionally. Then this work pleases. A tower has suddenly arisen accompanied by the passionate plaudits of the crowd. That is the fact. This tower should be demolished. That is not easy, since by a singular magic almost all the battering-rams brought against it turn into buttresses which add their weight to the solidity of the monument. This monument must be convinced that it does not exist, this crowd that its admiration has not moved all those stones, that it lies; that it is hallucinated, or that it is imbecile. This cannot be done. It finds the tower beautiful. What can we answer, except "Yes, it is beautiful"? The priest takes a wafer on the corporal and elevates it to divine dignity. He places it in the monstrance and shows it to the people, who during this ceremony kneel, bow, pray and believe. The work exalted by success is no less chosen by chance than the wafer by the priest's fingers; but its divinity, also, is no less certain the moment this choice has been made. The decrees of destiny must be respected, and popular piety not thwarted. II Yet, it is said, there is an aesthetic. There are several aesthetics, even. But we shall suppose there is but one, and that--always in principle--it has good reasons for opposing success, whatever it may be. Acceptance of an aesthetic obliges us to admit that there is an absolute beauty, and that works are deemed beautiful according to the degree of their resemblance to this vague and complaisant ideal. It is this aesthetic--admitting its existence for the moment--that is now to be laid open and submitted to the scalpel.