Refinement. While the possession of this quality is due, in the first instance, to education, it is also largely a matter of temperament.

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object.

The more refined the more unhappy.

The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, ridgidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom, — a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom, — is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.

Therefore, one will see in the so-called refined ages, softness degenerate not seldom into effeminacy, plainness into insipidity, correctness into emptiness, liberality into arbitrariness, lightness into frivolity, calm into apathy, and the most contemptible caricature border upon the most glorious humanity.

Time refines all things that age with time.

If the meaning of life is futility, human longevity loses its luster.

The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age. (p. 272)

I have suffered into truth (...) Time refines all things that age with time

It is not extravagance, it is not excitement, it is not excess, or dizziness, or delirium, that chastises habitual pleasure in art, but only dullness.[…] One of the Latin races, having the dullness and keeping wit enough to name it, has the word for it—banalité.

Perhaps the question was premature in Turner's time, but not now. Currently we see around us an ever more apparent loss of vigor of our society: increasing fixity of the power structure and bureaucratization of all levels of life; impotence of political institutions to carry off great projects; the proliferation of regulations affecting all aspects of public, private, and commercial life; the spread of irrationalism; the banalization of popular culture; the loss of willingness by individuals to take risks, to fend for themselves or think for themselves; economic stagnation and decline; the deceleration of the rate of technological innovation. . . . Everywhere you look, the writing is on the wall. Without

There is nothing more hideous than excessive refinement (in food, dress, lifestyle, etc.)

Instead of gathering the lost Sparks of holiness and restoring the unity of mankind and the world, the whole point of our existence has become an ever more rigid purification, a sifting out of dissenting views, the banishment of anything which threatens to challenge our customs and ingrained ways of thinking, or which makes us uncomfortable or uncertain—