My answer is that such a craving will become stronger, or at least wider-spread, in proportion as mankind grows more intelligent, therefore less exhausted by struggling against adverse circumstances, inbred defects and inherited superstitions. In proportion, likewise, as it will have learned to value its own virtues as they can minister to man’s prosperity and betterment. Nay, more: the time will come when we shall turn with disgust and wrath at their cultivation for any other purpose; and when pleasure in virtue and in heroism for its own sake may come to be accounted so much æsthetic dilettantism, questionable and well-nigh obsolete. For with the orientation of morals towards human usefulness, towards dutifulness conceived as decency, people will get to understand that what man craves for as consolation and enhancement, the passion deeper and steadier, the harmony more complete than real life furnishes, Man creates for himself in poetry and art, and in the things of reality seen as poetry and art. In all this he has made himself a realm where truth is never betrayed, because in its sheer existence _true_ and _false_ become words without a meaning; moreover, where the deepest and highest passions are satisfied without being misapplied or wasted, because satisfied by their mere expression. Art and whatever the poor word _Art_ may stand for――is the man-made sanctuary of the legitimate, the innocent, the immaculately _decent_, because it is closed to the shifting _needs_, the partial truths, above all, the _mine_ and _thine_, which trouble real life. This, in its way, is also a realm of _otherness_, inasmuch as it transcends the self with its _here_ and its _now_. Yet an _otherwise_ not merely recognized by Intelligence, but made by the heart’s desire out of the heart’s own substance and in desire’s own shape; for of such are the forms of the painter and sculptor, no less than the counterfeit presentments of the poet. Above all, in the twin arts of architecture and of music do we already meet the clarified embodiment of the longing and clinging, the solemn appeasement and victorious stress and fulfilment of human passion. Here, in art’s interludes of life, we can obtain what religious creeds lay open to the reproach of being false because they give it for true; and what love seeks to make unchanging, only to taste the bitterness of change. So that many as have been and will be the successive responses to our æsthetic cravings, the manifold satisfactions thereof, embodying as they do the purified essence of our feelings and activities, will, in the endless shifting of our valuations, perhaps constitute the one region where we need not be watching for Proteus. IV PROTEUS AND INTELLECTUAL MANNERS