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that tribal forms of body decorationalarming in our eyesare expressions of an erring, unformed, or vitiated taste. We may wonder how it could ever have occurred to anybody that man or woman is improved or made more comely by such practices, widespread among traditional peoples and not absent among those of more advanced cultures, as flattening or otherwise deforming the skull by binding in infancy, scarifying the face and body, enlarging lips or ear-lobes to monstrous size, perforating the lips and nasal septum, dwarfing the feet, cultivating steatopygy, and similar distortions of the human form. Less startling, but equally expressive of a taste different from ours, are tattooing and loading the body with an excessive weight of jewelry and other adornments. The grotesque images of gods that certain peoples have worshipped may be the reflections of a fearsome theology, or they may spring from a grotesque aesthetic taste.

As people's thoughts become clearer, their artistic creations, as judged by the natural criteria that I have proposed, tend also to improve, although there are doubtless exceptions to this rule. One thinks of the Greeks, whose clear vision of nature and ideal of a balanced life guided by reason had as its counterpart in art the creation of forms so faithful to their originals that they still delight us. In Egypt, Ikhnaton's revolt against enthralling tradition and his simplification of religious thought went hand in hand with freer and more natural expression in art. The Italian renaissance was a movement of liberation in art no less than in thought, a turning to nature as the ultimate source of beauty no less than of truth. In all parts of the world, in the measure that humans have freed their minds of old errors and debasing superstitions, their art has become more faithful to natural models. One wonders whether some of the unusual turns that modern art has taken are not a manifestation of intellectual degeneration. The half-formed mind turns away from nature; the mature mind returns to it.

Some of the aesthetic values we may consider false, both in other cultures and in our own, appear to result from another derangement of value. So great has been the loss of vital integrity caused by confused thinking that people have tended to become incapable of

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evaluating any situation in their own lives on its own merits; they have become unduly concerned with how they would appear to others. When a person chooses a covering for the body, the chief consideration is not its comfort and suitability to the climate, but whether it enhances social prestige. The same motive makes him or her submit to the painful operations of cicatrizing, tattooing, or even deforming the body, sometimes ruining its natural grace. In marriage, too, love and the real worth of a nuptial partner have often been subordinated to the material, social, or political advantages of the alliance.

In countless instances, sound values have been compromised or sacrificed for the spurious values of external approval. Satisfactions have not been permitted to sprout at the points where they would spontaneously grow, but have again and again perversely been grafted upon some unnatural stock. Such subordination of vital to artificial values would not be so pathetic if it promoted happiness, but its effect is often just the reverse. Since the natural human being is often readier to find fault with than to praise neighbors, to sacrifice one's own satisfaction for the applause of others frequently brings joy to nobody. The very foundations of contentment are undermined by this perversion of values, which, springing from intellectual confusion, is one of the afflictions of intelligence in its formative stage.

The Rank Growth of Special Motives

As though error, gullible curiosity, and the falsification of values, with all the consequent waste, pain, and confusion, has not sufficiently afflicted a humanity struggling to master the