which in most minds are still confused, intertrammelled and conflicting. His work is the ordering of what in most minds is disordered. That his _failures_ to bring order out of chaos are often more conspicuous than those of other men is due in part at least to his greater audacity; it is a penalty of ambition and a consequence of his greater plasticity. But when he succeeds, the value of what he has accomplished is found always in a more perfect organisation which makes more of the possibilities of response and activity available. What value is and which experiences are most valuable will never be understood so long as we think in terms of those large abstractions, the virtues and the vices. “You do invert the covenants of her trust,” said Comus, that disreputable advocate of Utilitarianism, to the Lady, that enemy of Nature. Instead of recognising that value lies in the ‘minute particulars’ of response and attitude, we have tried to find it in conformity to abstract prescriptions and general rules of conduct. The artist is an expert in the ‘minute particulars’ and _qua_ artist pays little or no attention to generalisations which he finds in actual: practice are too crude to discriminate between what is valuable and the reverse. For this reason the moralist has always tended to distrust or to ignore him. Yet since the fine conduct of life springs only from fine ordering of responses far too subtle to be touched by any general ethical maxims, this neglect of art by the moralist has been tantamount to a disqualification. The basis of morality, as Shelley insisted, is laid not by preachers but by poets. Bad taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise admirable person. They are actually a root evil from which other defects follow. No life can be excellent in which the elementary responses are disorganised and confused. CHAPTER IX Actual and Possible Misapprehensions Who Saith that? It is not written so on high!—_Cain_. Every true view, perhaps, has its crude analogues, due sometimes to a confused perception of the real state of affairs, sometimes to faulty statement. Often these clumsy or mistaken offshoots are responsible for the difficulty with which the true view gains acceptance. Like shadows, reflections, or echoes, they obscure and baffle apprehension. Nowhere are they more inconvenient than in the problem of the moral function of art. A consideration of some instances will help to make clearer what has been said, to distinguish the view recommended from its disreputable relatives and to remove possible misapprehensions.