belief that any single judgment may do it--the mind of any one critic, expert or practitioner--is preposterous. But this does not suspend individual judgment or make it vain, since it is through the conflict or discord of all genuine individual judgments that new conceptions or attempts at concord emerge. This conflict arises from unsatisfied desire and, in the end, we think Beethoven better than Bach only because Beethoven more profoundly satisfies our desire or satisfies a deeper desire than any satisfied by Bach. Just as new conceptions emerge or are induced from discordant or unrelated conceptions so new emotions and new desires are induced from the discordance or conflict of our desires. This process of organization would seem infinite--a conception which I, personally, find intolerable and incomprehensible--were it not for a strange phenomenon, and this phenomenon is that ultimately at the core of all men there seems to be the same desire. The world is not really divided as to who are its greatest painters, sculptors, scientists, mathematicians, musicians and poets. We may not be able to prove to our own logical satisfaction that Beethoven is greater than Bach, that Bach is greater than Haydn, that Palestrina is greater than Verdi, but we are all strangely certain that it is so. What are we to make of this? Evidently there is a unity somewhere in our diversity, and it is more than a lowest common factor--a far-away dim primitive element, never quite lost sight of but growing ever fainter, linking all men and all art. It is not that touch of nature making the whole world kin, for that--although it might enable us to have some sympathy with all things--would not enable us to range them in value. Such a minute dose of common kinship could not so vitally relate us. It is, on the contrary, by our very essence, by the most spiritual and intense of our desires that we are united. We are not unanimous about Scriabin, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn and Dvorak, just as we are not unanimous about Aubrey Beardsley, Sargent, El Greco, or about Byron, Tennyson, and Conrad.