of emotion and intelligence which gives us the aesthetic sense. Intelligence is an accident. Genius is a catastrophe. We must carefully avoid even dreaming of a social state where health, equilibrium, equity, moderation, order would reign uniformly, where catastrophes would be impossible, and accidents very rare. Human intelligence is certainly the consequence of what we naïvely call evil. If the threads did not become cut and knotted, if emotion always attained its goal, men would be stronger and handsomer, and their houses would be as perfect as ant-hills. Only, the world would not exist. III Before returning to our point of departure, here is a résumé: Two sorts of emotions share in the shaping of the aesthetic sense: emotions of a genesial nature, and all the other emotions whatsoever, in a proportion which varies infinitely with each man. The first are those which we feel when confronted with the perfect representation of our racial type. Apollo is beautiful, because he is the human male in all its purity. For the majority of men, every adventitious idea being rigorously excluded, the sight of the marble is agreeable because it evokes desire, either directly or, according to the sex, by counter-evocation. Stendhal's saying will be remembered: "Beauty is a promise of happiness." The sensualistic philosophy which enabled him to make this definition was not stupid. We shall be obliged to return to it, with science as a point of support. In short, it was then for the purpose of describing the "promise of happiness," that the word "beauty" was invented. And this word has been successively applied to everything that promised men the realization of one of their increasingly numerous and complex desires. Later, the emotional need having become extremely developed, it was also applied to all causes of emotion, even terrible or sanguinary; but these varied emotions, which make up the very life of man, have a goal--like the sense of smell in the emperor-moth. They penetrate us to make us remember that our one duty, as living creatures, is to conserve the species. Whatever sense they may have struck first, they recoil from it towards the centre of general sensibility. I think of those romantic lovers seen enveloped by the storm, possessing each other furiously, or of the gentle emotion of Tibullus, _quam juvat immites_.... The horrible, stupid, savage tragedies which delighted the Greeks and the French of the _ancien régime_ were philters, and nothing more. If the great poets (like women, great poets have neither taste nor sense of disgust) had not taken the trouble to rethink the stories of Orestes, of Thyestes, of Polynices, we would deem these to be the delirious ravings of a society in its infancy or in its final decay. Not one of Racine's tragedies but has been played a hundred times in the criminal court by loathsome actors. You will find, if you look for them, in the special