 As he became older, there was one aspect of his aesthetics that he was uneasy with. In the Aesthetic of 1901 (Aes. 82–7, 114), and again in Essence of Aesthetic of 1913 (EA 13–16) , he had been happy to deduce from his theory that art cannot have an ethical purpose. The only value in art is beauty. But by 1917, in the essay The Totality of Artistic Expression (PPH 261–73), his attitude towards the moral content of art is more nuanced. This may have been only a shift of emphasis, or, charitably perhaps, drawing out a previously unnoticed implication: ‘If the ethical principle is a cosmic [universal] force (as it certainly is) and queen of the world, the world of liberty, she reigns in her own right, while art, in proportion to the purity with which she re-enacts and expresses the motions of reality, is herself perfect’ (PPH 267). In other words, he still holds that to speak of a moral work of art would not impinge upon it aesthetically; likewise to speak of an immoral work, for the values of the aesthetic and moral domains are absolutely incommensurable. It is not merely an assertion that within the domain of pure intuition, the concepts simply don’t apply; that would merely beg the question. He means that a pure work of art cannot be subject to moral praise or blame because the Aesthetic domain exists independently of and prior, in the Philosophy of Spirit, to the Ethical.