Ethics and the Fine Arts.

Professor Palmer delivered the third lecture of the William Belden Noble series last evening on the subject, "Ethics and the Fine Arts." He said in part:

The good and the beautiful as abstract qualities are in most ways almost inseparable. It has been said that moral philosophers are really no more than connoisseurs of true beauty. True beauty cannot be sinful, for a distinctive quality of beauty and holiness alike is unity, and the distinctive quality of sinfulness is incoherence.

Yet although goodness and beauty are in many ways so closely allied, there is between them a distinction. Beauty as shown in a work of art is complete, isolated, finite. Goodness, on the contrary, cannot be conceived except in "growing" terms, and as never quite capable of reaching the goal of its ambition. This is the distinction between goodness and beauty, and it is in this very finite perfection of a work of art that the defect of beauty lies.