Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/220

 206 w. E. SCOTT : stances of the sensual and physical pleasures of his time, 1 he concludes, by a process of exclusion, that it is only in the delight due to Beauty that tranquillity is to be found, " for all the pleasures of Sense are short and fugitive ; grow fainter with age, and duller by repetition ; cannot be revived but after some intervals ; and must wait the return of appetite, which are (sic) not always at any man's call, and seldom at theirs who indulge them most. But the pleasures of Imagination are free from all those inconveniences ; and are both of larger extent and longer duration. They com- prehend, not only all that is beautiful in Nature, but all that is elegant and curious in Art. Nor are they even con- fined to objects that have a real existence, but can be raised by intellectual images, and Beings of the Mind's own creation. 2 The material and the moral world are equally the scenes of these refined pleasures ; and the mind receives the like amiable ideas of Beauty, Order, Harmony, from the structure and contrivance of both." 3 Arbuckle's treatment of Tranquillity presents two points of interest. Here, as elsewhere, at times, he is not so opti- mistic as Shaftesbury. often he writes, not merely in a tone of world-pity, but almost of despair ; and, while never doubting the ideal of the "life beautiful," he sometimes seems to lose hope of its practical realisation. " There passes not an age," he writes, " wherein starts not up once or twice some great imperial destroyer, who, to gratify a brutal pride, and insatiable lust of dominion, lays waste whole provinces, countries and nations ; invades Nature herself ; and the more effectually to drown the cries of the universe, abolishes, perhaps, a whole language in the destruction of those who spoke it. ... Can the Happiness of Virtue be perfect and entire amidst a scene so filled with disagree- able and shocking events?" 4 His optimism, however, is re-established by the " encouragement he has to look up for a future place of rest," where a higher and unmarred beauty will atone for the imperfections of the present. In the second place, under the head of Tranquillity, Arbuckle makes some general remarks relative to Con- 1 Hibernicus's Letters, ii., p. 147. 2 Arbuckle here contradicts his previous assertion that Beauty arises from the appreciation of External objects. The reconciliation of these inconsistent statements may be found in the theory of the imaginative dramatisation of the self, which is an eighteenth century approach to the later problem of the sensibility, namely, how the activity of the self can become passive for purposes of perception. 3 Ibid., ii., pp. 104-5. 'Ibid., i., p. 228.