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12 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

A third negation, effected by means of the theory of art as
intuition, is that art is a moral act; that is to say, that form
of practical act which, although necessarily uniting with the
useful and with pleasure and pain, is not immediately utili-
tarian and hedonistic, and moves in a superior spiritual
sphere. But the intuition, in so far as it is a theoretic act, is
opposed to the practical of any sort. And in truth, art, as has
been remarked from the earliest times, does not arise as an
act of the will; good will, which constitutes the honest man,
does not constitute the artist. And since it is not the result of
an act of will, so it escapes all moral discrimination, not be-
cause a privilege of exemption is accorded to it, but simply be-
cause moral discrimination cannot be applied to art. An artistic
image portrays an act morally praiseworthy or blamewor-
thy; but this image, as image, is neither morally praisewor-
thy nor blameworthy. Not only is there no penal code that
can condemn an image to prison or to death, but no moral
judgment, uttered by a rational person, can make of it its
object: we might just as well judge the square moral or the
triangle immoral as the Francesca of Dante immoral or the
Cordelia of Shakespeare moral, for these have a purely ar-
tistic function, they are like musical notes in the souls of
Dante and of Shakespeare. Further, the moralistic theory
of art is also represented in the history of æsthetie doctrines,
though much discredited in the common opinion of our times,
not only on account of its intrinsic demerit, but also, in some
measure, owing to the moral demerit of certain tendencies
of our times, which render possible, owing to psychological
dislike, that refutation of it which should be made—and
which we here make—solely for logical reasons. The end
attributed to art, of directing the good and inspiring horror
of evil, of coιτecting and ameliorating customs, is a dériva-

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