Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/229

204 point out that all illustrations of the tendency fall into two classes, representing respectively the sentimental and the heroic individualism. These are the forms of that Nobler Selfishness which benevolent hedonism defends. They are efforts to find the contented and perfected self. Their failure is the failure of individualism, and therewith of hedonism.

As for the sentimental individualism, we have seen already how unstable are its criteria of perfection, how full of fickleness is its life. The sentimental self admits that the world cannot understand it, and will not receive it; but it insists that this neglect comes because the world does not appreciate the strength and beauty of the inner emotional life. The ideal, then, is devotion to a culture of the beautiful soul, and to a separation of this soul from all other life. Let other souls be saved m like fashion. One does not object to their salvation; but one insists that each saved soul dwells apart in its own sensitive feelings, in the world of higher artistic pleasures. Now in fact such lives may be not uninteresting to the moralist; but no moralist can be really content with their ideal. Its best direct refutation is after all a sense of humor strong enough to let the sensitive and beautiful soul see once in a while how comical is its demure pursuit of these subjective phantoms. This miserable life of deep inward excitements and longings, how absurd it seems to any critic who, standing outside, sees that there is nothing more than froth and illusion and hypocrisy in it. Heine’s anecdote of the monkey boiling his own tail so as to get an inward sense of the nature and worth of the art of