age of reason

— Book 1: Reason alone teaches us to know good and bad. . . . Before the age of reason we do good and bad without knowing it, and there is no morality in our actions. . . . A child wants to upset everything he sees; he smashes, breaks everything he can reach. Book 4: We hold that no child who dies before the age of reason will be deprived of eternal happiness. . . . The whole difference I see here between you and me is that you claim that children have this capacity [i.e., to recognize the divinity] at seven, and I do not even accord it to them at fifteen.

— In Mozart, The Dramatist, Brigid Brophy argues that Mozart's music is epitomal of the age of reason. Tightly constructed, elaborately designed, it is complete unto itself. Like the graphic balance in a Beardsley print, or the perfectly weighted epigram of Oscar Wilde, the triumph is in the perfect union of form and content: the transcendence of the artifice, the sublimeness of the created object.