As Shaftesbury had stated the matter, however, it was left on the whole vague and large. He made no very clear distinction between the creative artistic impulse in life and critical æsthetic appreciation. In the sphere of morals we must often be content to wait until our activity is completed to appreciate its beauty or its ugliness.[103] On the background of general æsthetic judgment we have to concentrate on the forces of creative artistic activity, whose work it is painfully to mould the clay of moral action, and forge its iron, long before the æsthetic criterion can be applied to the final product. The artist’s work in life is full of struggle and toil; it is only the spectator of morals who can assume the calm æsthetic attitude. Shaftesbury, indeed, evidently recognised this, but it was not enough to say, as he said, that we may prepare ourselves for moral action by study in literature. One may be willing to regard living as an art, and yet be of opinion that it is as unsatisfactory to learn the art of living in literature as to learn, let us say, the art of music in architecture. Yet we must not allow these considerations to lead us away from the great fact that Shaftesbury clearly realised—what modern psychology emphasises—that desires can only be countered by desires, that reason cannot affect appetite. “That which is of original and pure nature,” he declared, “nothing besides contrary habit and custom (a second nature) is able to displace. There is no speculative opinion, persuasion, or belief, which is capable immediately or directly to exclude or destroy it.” Where he went beyond some modern psychologists is in his Hellenic perception that in this sphere of instinct we are amid the play of art to which æsthetic criteria alone can be applied. It was necessary to concentrate and apply these large general ideas. To some extent this was done by Shaftesbury’s immediate successors and followers, such as Hutcheson and Arbuckle, who taught that man is, ethically, an artist whose work is his own life. They concentrated attention on the really creative aspects of the artist in life, æsthetic appreciation of the finished product being regarded as secondary. For all art is, primarily, not a contemplation, but a doing, a creative action, and morality is so preëminently.