Note 112 — Chapter VI · THE ART OF MORALS

This has been well seen by Jules de Gaultier: “The joys and the sorrows which fill life are, the one and the other,” he says (La Dépendance de la Morale et l’Indépendance des Mœurs, p. 340), “elements of spectacular interest, and without the mixture of both that interest would be abolished. To make of the representative worth of phenomena their justification in view of a spectacular end alone, avoids the objection by which the moral thesis is faced, the fact of pain. Pain becomes, on the contrary, the correlative of pleasure, an indispensable means for its realization. Such a thesis is in agreement with the nature of things, instead of being wounded by their existence.”