suppresses to a minimum all deference to these impulses, then certainly
I am not an ascetic; if a sensualist is one who gives himself to
heedless gratification, then certainly I am not a sensualist. But I find
myself balanced in an intermediate position by something that I will
speak of as the sense of Beauty. This sense of Beauty is something in me
which demands not simply gratification but the best and keenest of a
sense or continuance of sense impressions, and which refuses coarse
quantitative assuagements. It ranges all over the senses, and just as I
refuse to wholly cut off any of my motives, so do I refuse to limit its
use to the plane of the eye or the ear.

It seems to me entirely just to speak of beauty in matters of scent and
taste, to talk not only of beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of
beautiful beer and beautiful cheese! The balance as between asceticism
and sensuality comes in, it seems to me, if we remember that to drink
well one must not have drunken for some time, that to see well one's eye
must be clear, that to make love well one must be fit and gracious and
sweet and disciplined from top to toe, that the finest sense of all--the
joyous sense of bodily well-being--comes only with exercises and
restraints and fine living. There I think lies the way of my
disposition. I do not want to live in the sensual sty, but I also do not
want to scratch in the tub of Diogenes.

But I diverge a little in these comments from my present business of
classifying motives.

Next I perceive hypertrophied in myself and many sympathetic human
beings a passion that many animals certainly possess, the beautiful and
fearless cousin of fear, Curiosity, that seeks keenly for knowing and
feeling. Apart from appetites and bodily desires and blind impulses, I