To live for Others, then, is no more the true epitome of a natural ethics than is, to live for Self. The true epitome is, Live for the Whole—the Whole which includes both others and yourself, which is greater than all humanity, yet is capable of being faithfully served in the silence of one human breast. We have now before us, therefore, a clear conception of the criterion and the sanction of ethical action. The criterion is applied when we ask of anything done by man, “Does it further life in the Whole?” The sanction is found in the fact that each of us is an organic part of that Whole. The richest and fullest life is evidently to be won by the most complete development of all our faculties which is allowed us by our opportunities. Ethics, therefore, exists for life, not life for ethics. This simple proposition arises inevitably from the scientific conception of the world. The greatest of fallacies is to conceive life as existing for any other object whatsoever, or to define its aim as something more or less remote from our present existence. Our ‘eternal life’ is not something to come—we are living it here and now. This is not a pilgrimage or a place of preparation; it leads us to no heaven, no hell, no distant judgment seat. We are before that judgment seat every hour; the heaven and the hell which it dispenses are the daily experiences through which we move; and the saints and prophets of this faith are those who have felt most deeply and revealed most profoundly the great realities of existence, hidden from us not so much by the darkness of the grave as by the impalpable veils of use and wont. The grave has mystery indeed but no terror of gloom for those who realize that the universe is but an eddy on the stream of life. By that eddy we see the stream, we feel its power and movement; and we know that the substance of which it is made is the stuff of life itself. PART III: ART CHAPTER X ART AND LIFE “Like a living thing, one and whole.”—Aristotle.[163] The third chapter of Tolstoy’s book, What is Art? contains a summary of the opinions of some sixty modern writers (taken chiefly from Schasler’s Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik) on the essential meaning of the terms Art and Beauty. All these opinions, after having been duly paraded across the stage, are dismissed by Tolstoy as a mass of “enchanted confusion and contradictoriness,” and he then proceeds to build up his own theory of art. As the latest critical treatment of the subject on a large scale by a thinker and an artist who has made a deep impression on the minds of men, his conclusions deserve careful attention on the part of any later writer who desires to deal with the perennially attractive but very obscure problems of æsthetics. Let me begin by quoting the passage with which Tolstoy closes the fourth chapter of his work:—