The name is absent

62 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

educated heroes. The criticism of the philosophy underlying
Dante’s poem is certainly possible, but that criticism will en-
ter the subterranean parts of the art of Dante as though by
undermining, and will leave intact the soil on the surface,
which is the art; Nicholas Macchiavelli will be able to de-
stroy the Dantesque political ideal, recommending neither
an emperor nor an international pope as greyhound of libera-
tion, but a tyrant or a national prince; but he will not have
eradicated that aspiration from Dante’s poem. In like man-
ner, it may be advisable not to show and not to permit to boys
and young men the reading of certain pictures, romances,
and plays; but this recommendation and act of forbidding
will be limited to the practical sphere and will affect, not the
works of art, but the books and canvases which serve as in-
struments for the reproduction of the art, which, as practical
works, paid for in the market at a price equivalent to so much
corn or gold, can also themselves be shut up in a cabinet or
cupboard, and even be burnt in a “pyre of vanities,” a la Sa-
vonarola. To confound the various phases of development in
an ill-understood impulse for unity, to make morality domi-
nate art, when and so far as art surpasses morality, or art
dominate science, when and so far as science dominates or
surpasses art, or has already been itself dominated and sur-
passed by life: this is what unity well understood which is
also rigorous distinction, should prevent and reject.

And it should prevent and reject it also, because the estab-
lished order of the various stages of the circle makes it pos-
sible to understand not only the independence and the de-
pendence of the various forms of the spirit, but also the
preservation of this order of the one in the other. It is well
to mention one of the problems which present themselves in
this place, or rather to return to it, for I have already referred

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