The sense of proportion, then, is that fineness of susceptibility by
which we appreciate in a given object, person, force, or mood,
serviceableness in regard to reason's work; in other words, by which we
estimate the capacity to transform the Universe in such a way that men
may ultimately be enabled to give their hearty consent to its existence,
which at present no man rationally can.


III

Now, art appeals to fine susceptibilities; for, as I have explained
elsewhere,[3] the value of works of art depends on their having come as
"real and intimate experiences to a large number of gifted men"--men who
have some kinship to that "finely touched and gifted man, the [Greek
_heuphnaes_] of the Greeks," to use the phrase of our greatest modern
critic. And in so far as we are able to judge between works successfully
making such an appeal, we must be governed by this sense of proportion,
which measures how things stand in regard to reason; that is, not merely
intellect, not merely emotion, but the alliance of both by means of the
imagination in aid of man's most central demand--the demand for
nobler life.

Perhaps I ought to point out before proceeding, that this position is
not that of the writers on art most in view at the present day. It is
the negation of the so-called scientific criticism, and also of the
personal theory that reduces art to an expression of, and an appeal to,
individual temperaments; it is the assertion of the sovereignty of the
aesthetic conscience on exactly the same grounds as sovereignty is
claimed for the moral conscience. AEsthetics deals with the morality of
appeals addressed to the senses. That is, it estimates the success of