particular live years are the only hope for the preservation of the art
concerned.

The essential difficulty with all such arguments is that the aesthetic
interests to which they appeal are personal, and depend on personal
preferences. Most of us in such matters, having no special knowledge,
and liking some variety of differing styles, modestly give way to the
authority of any one who makes a profession of the art. In the laying
out of a park a landscape architect may prefer single trees and open
spaces, where the neighbors and abutters prefer a grove. In the long run
his taste is no better than theirs, though he may argue as if they were
ignorant and uncultivated because they disagree with him. In all such
cases, unless there is some consideration of practical expediency, such
as letting the southwest wind blow through in summer, arguments can do
little except to make and keep everybody angry. Their chief value is to
make us see things which perhaps we had not thought of.

In practice these three kinds of arguments, which turn on moral,
practical, and aesthetic considerations, tend to be much mingled. The
human mind is very complex, and our various interests and preferences
are inseparably tangled. The treacheries of self-analysis are
proverbial, and are only less dangerous than trying to make out the
motives of other people. Accordingly we must expect to find that it is
sometimes hard to distinguish between moral and aesthetic motives and
practical, for the morality and the taste of a given people always in
part grow out of the slow crystallizing of practical expediencies, and
notions of morality change with the advance of civilization.

Furthermore, one must never forget that an argument of policy which
does not involve and rest on subsidiary questions of fact is rare; and