‘This spectacle of man offered to man has considerable moral effects. First, a valuable exercise of the intelligence, an increase of reflection, a widening of the view in every direction, result from the habit thus set up of getting out of oneself and entering into others, to understand their actions, to share in their passions, sympathize with their sufferings, appreciate their motives. This faculty of the artist communicated to the spectator or the listener, this faculty of participation and assimilation, is something set up in opposition to egotism and is a condition of tolerance and benevolence, frequently even of justice. Then, lessons of virtue, frequently not the least effective, are given to the spectator, from the very fact that he is placed in a position to praise or condemn acts or thoughts which are set before him relative to cases where his own interests are not involved. He recognizes his own image in the actor of the epic, a man like himself, a voluntary and impassioned agent, whose dangers though perhaps magnified are not foreign to his own experience. Then the essential phenomena which characterize conscious humanity and morality occur in him who thus witnesses himself in the person of another, i.e. disinterested objectivity of himself to himself, generalization of passion, motive and maxim, judgment founded on the universal, self-examination to arrive at what is duty, clear and defined sentiment of the direction of the will. ‘_But this must not lead us to think that the poet’s object is utility or morality. If it were, he would be lacking in the true feeling of art._ Teaching, moralizing--this object of the artist is indirect, i.e. does not exist systematically for him. He must only attain it without having sought it, and sometimes he attains it when he seems to have departed from it. What he desires to do, is to touch the feelings, to arouse emotions. But it happens that by doing so he elevates, purifies, moralizes. The poet (I am especially speaking of him) does indeed address himself to everyone. _That means he can only sing the universal_, however curious such an assembly of words may appear. He may indeed sing it under the form of the particular, without which his fictions would be lacking in life, he none the less excludes the pure, incomprehensible, inexplicable individual, shorn of all truth if he does not express a relationship.[181] He generalizes passion, therefore ennobles it and renders it at once the object of observation, reflection and disinterested emotion. The listener, carried away from his own relatively base private preoccupations and transported without hope or fear (at least, too personal and too present hope and fear) into the superior sphere of humanity’s common passion, feels the benefit of an elevation of soul; his consciousness is temporarily freed from egotism.’ (Renouvier, _Introduction à la philosophie analytique de l’Histoire_, p. 354.) Note H (Page 56)