THE DISPUTES OF THE FLUTE-PLAYERS

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.