In aesthetics, that is to say in the clouds, one can argue more and
better than in any other subject. It is there that one must be cautious.
It is there that one has everything to fear: indifference as well as
partiality, coldness as well as passion, knowledge as well as ignorance,
artfulness, wit, subtlety and an innocence which is more dangerous than
craft. In al] matters of aesthetics you must dread sophisms, especially
when they are beautiful, and you will find admirable ones. In this
field you must not even trust the mathematical mind, which is so perfect
and so sublime, but of such delicacy as a mechanism that it cannot work
except in the void, because a grain of sand in its wheelwork is enough
to make it go wrong. One shudders when one thinks to what length such a
grain of sand can drag a mathematical brain. Think of Pascal!
Aesthetics is founded on nothing solid. It is a castle in the air.
Men have tried to prop it upon ethics. But there is no ethics. There is
no sociology. Nor is there any biology. The completion of the sciences
has never existed except in the brain of M. Auguste Comte, whose books
are prophetical. When an exact biology will have been established, that
is to say in some millions of years, it may perhaps be possible to
establish a sociology. That will also take a great number of centuries.
Then will come the time when you may properly create an aesthetic
science on solid foundations. But by that time our planet will be very
old and will approach the term of its destiny. The sun whose spots, not
without reason, trouble us even now, will in those days turn to the
earth a face of somber and fuliginous red, half covered by opaque
scoriae, and the last men, taking refuge in the depths of mines, will be
less anxious to dispute on the essence of the beautiful than to bum
their last fragments of coal before plunging into the eternal ice.
