Are we to conclude, then, that the artist is bound to aim positively and always at producing a _good moral effect_ through his work? By no means. Esthetic pleasure is, as we have said, indifferent. The pursuit of it, through the conception and expression of the beautiful, is the proper and intrinsic end of the fine arts, and is in itself legitimate so long as it does not run counter to the moral law. It has no need to run counter to the moral law, nor can it do so without defeating its own end. Outside its proper limits art ceases to be art; within its proper limits it has a noble and elevating mission; and it can serve indirectly but powerfully the interests of truth and goodness by helping men to substitute for the lower and grosser pleasures of sense the higher and purer esthetic pleasures which issue from the disinterested contemplation of the beautiful.
CHAPTER VIII. THE CATEGORIES OF BEING. SUBSTANCE AND ACCIDENT.
59. THE CONCEPTION OF ULTIMATE CATEGORIES.—Having examined so far the notion of real being itself, which is the proper subject-matter of ontology, and those widest or transcendental notions which are coextensive with that of reality, we must next inquire into the various modes in which we find real being expressed, determined, actualized, as it falls within our experience. In other words, we must examine the _highest categories of being_, the _suprema genera entis_. Considered from the point of view of the logical arrangement of our concepts, each of these categories reveals itself as a primary and immediate limitation of the extension of the transcendental concept of real being itself. Each is ultimately distinct from the others in the sense that no two of them can be brought under any other as a genus, nor can we discover any intermediate notion between any one of them and the notion of being itself. The latter notion is not properly a genus of which they would be species, nor can it be predicated univocally of any two or more of them (2). Each is itself an ultimate genus, a _genus supremum_.
By using these notions as predicates of our judgments we are enabled to interpret things, to obtain a genuine if inadequate insight into reality; for we assume as established in the _Theory of Knowledge_ that all our universal concepts have real and objective validity, that they give us real knowledge of the nature of those individual things which form the data of our sense experience. Hence the study of the categories, which is for Logic a classification of our widest concepts, become for Metaphysics an inquiry into the modes which characterize real being.(215) By determining what these modes are, by studying their characteristics, by tracing them through the data of experience, we advance in our knowledge of reality.