This is the point that Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley understood. It was why they used poetry as a means of achieving the moral reformation of individuals and of society. It was also the point that De Quincey pressed to its logical conclusion. In a world of empathy-based ethics, the moral sense is ultimately the aesthetic sense. And that means that when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth. And in a world in which the idea of universal human nature has been abandoned or attenuated to the point of being meaningless, it also means that those who
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