More interesting and useful, if we are to follow at all closely the ethical thought of our period, is it to observe the attitude adopted to ethics by Taine’s contemporary, Renan. The extreme confidence which Renan professed to have in “science,” and indeed in all intellectual pursuits, led him to accord to morality rather a secondary place. “There are three great things,” he remarks in his _Discours et Conférences_,[2] “goodness, beauty and truth, and the greatest of these is truth.” Neither virtue, he continues, nor art is able to exclude illusions. Truth is the representation of reality, and in this world the search for truth is the most serious occupation of all. One of his main charges against the Christian Church in general is that it has insisted upon moral good to such an extent as to undervalue and depreciate the other goods, expressed in beauty and in truth. It has looked upon life from one point of view only—namely, the moral—and has judged all action by ethical values alone, despising in this way philosophy, science, literature, poetry, painting and music. In its more ascetic moods it has claimed that these things are “of the devil.” Thus Christianity has introduced a vicious distinction which has done much to mutilate human nature and to cramp the wholesome expression of the life of the human spirit. Whatever is an expression of spirit is, claims Renan, to be looked upon as sacred. If such a distinction as that of sacred and profane were to be drawn it should be between what appertains to the soul and what does not. The distinction, when made between the ethical and the beautiful or true, is disastrous. [2] _Discours_, dated November 26th, 1885. Renan considers that of the two, the ethical and the beautiful, the latter may be the finer and grander distinction, the former merely a species of it. The moral, he thinks, will give place to the beautiful. “Before any action,” he himself says in _L’Avenir de la Science_, “I prefer to ask myself, not whether it be good or bad, but whether it be beautiful or ugly, and I feel that I have in this an excellent criterion.” Morality, he further insists, has been conceived up to now in far too rigid a manner as obedience to a law, as a warfare and strife between opposing laws. But the really virtuous man is an artist who is creating beauty, the beauty of character, and is fashioning it out of his human nature, as the sculptor fashions a statue out of marble or a musician composes a melody from sounds. Neither the sculptor nor the musician feels that he is obeying a law. He is expressing and creating beauty.