from the fact that the muscles which move the eyeball are so situated that the eye can trace a curved line with less fatigue than a straight one. It admits also a rational explanation already given.

3. Esthetic emotion must be distinguished from the pleasure of mere excitement. In tragedy, comedy or novels, in theatrical and other exhibitions, there may be the enjoyment of beholding ideals. The plays of children are a mimicry of a life higher than their own. In their plays they are lifted out of the life of children into the life of men and women; by the "make-believes" which are the creations of a child's imagination they surround themselves with ideals of the pursuits and interests of mature life. Their pleasure in their plays is a sort of æsthetic enjoyment of the ideals of a life higher than their own. A drama is fitly called a play. A good theatrical performance, like the plays of children, lifts the spectators into a life higher than their own. The same is true of reading a good tragedy, or comedy, or novel. We are lifted out of our prosaic commonplace life into contact with heroism and beauty, with sweetness and grace; we see life in a higher intensity; we are admitted to the halls of nobility and the palaces of kings; we see men realizing the highest ideals in the lowest circumstances and under the greatest difficulties; we are compassed with the ideals of a life higher than our own. So far our emotions are largely aesthetic, and we are recreated, refreshed and healthily inspired and stimulated.

But the danger in these cases is of substituting the pleasure of mere excitement for the aesthetic inspiration. Men enjoy being excited. They like to be played on as a musical instrument by some master mind who pulls out all the stops and brings out the feelings in their utmost capacity and variety. It is mental exhilaration after the monotony and labor of daily life. Hence men may come to seek excitement in the drama, the theatre and the novel. Their minds become drunk with them and at last the victims of a habit of mental intoxication. They seek and must have the excitement; and in the thirst for excitement they lose their interest both in the beauty of the ideals of genius and in the simplicity and reality of actual life. In coarse natures the desire of excitement can be satisfied only with the bloodand-thunder stories of the sensational paper and the dime novel; or with bull-fights as in Spain, or the gladiatorial conflicts with men and beasts in the Amphitheatre of ancient Rome.

V. The emotion awakened by sublimity is joy and admiration, like that awakened by beauty, but it is a joy and admiration penetrated and made solemn with awe. It takes on a tone of solemnity and awe in the presence of what is above us. Great genius has a tone usually even of sadness.

It is sometimes said that terror belongs to emotions of sublimity.

On the contrary terror, being an emotion pertaining to personal interest, is entirely excluded from the æsthetic emotions. The painter Vernet in a storm at sea had himself lashed to the mast in order that he might contemplate the grandeur of the scene. If he had been frightened, the terror so far as it controlled him, would have excluded the emotion of sublimity.

VI. The emotions awakened by ugliness are those of the ludicrous, the ridiculous and the disgusting. An elephant "wallowing unwieldy, enormous in his gait," is ludicrous, because he is clumsy, as if with all his strength he could not use his own limbs. Drollery is ludicrous as a man's acting beneath himself. A monkey is ludicrous probably from suggesting the human form; "Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis." A fall is ludicrous as a sudden departure from the normal attitude. A combination of incongruous objects is ludicrous, exemplified in a squib on George IV.,

"The breakfast table spread with tea and toast,
Death-warrants and the Morning Post."

The ridiculous means more than the ludicrous as implying disesteem and depreciation. We laugh with the person who is in a ludicrous position, we laugh at one who is ridiculous. We get beyond laughter in the emotion of disgust. The lower orders of living beings are disgusting as revealing a low organization, an almost death in life; so is a heap of rubbish, or a mass of corruption as revealing disorder and decay.

44. Esthetic Culture.

Even with high esthetic culture the perception of beauty depends on the mood of the spirit. The world is always full of beauty but we do not always see it. A pebble does not commonly awaken æsthetic. emotion. But as I gaze on it and think that it has been floated and washed and worn by Titanic forces through measureless geological epochs, I feel the emotion of the sublime. So in the striking of a clock may be heard the voices of eternity. In everything is a door that opens into the infinite. To the eye of the Seer that door opens, and his spirit is awed. In ordinary moods we do not see the grandeurs and glories which nature, rightly contemplated, is always revealing.

"As one who looks on glass,

On it may rest his eye;

Or let his vision through it pass

And then the heavens espy."

But in any mood the degree of this power of seeing the beautiful and

sublime depends on culture. The aesthetic mind sees a soul looking out through all nature's forms.

"He sees them feel or links them with some feeling."

But nature little finds its way into the heart of the uncultured man. The need of culture for æsthetic perception is analogous to the similar need of it for the knowledge of the True and the Right already considered, and needs no further explanation.

Esthetic culture is promoted by intellectual culture in the knowledge of the truth and ethical culture in the knowledge of the Right. For the knowledge of the Perfect presupposes the knowledge of the True and of the Right. All spiritual culture is helpful to æsthetic culture.

Direct aesthetic culture is also needed. This is best effected by the study of the great works of genius. But æsthetic culture does not stop in itself; it reacts in prompting all spiritual culture. In studying the works of art we are made partakers of" the vision and faculty divine of genius;" for we have revealed to us what seers in the light of genius have seen in nature and in men. In reading a poem or in examining any work of art we are examining nature and life as genius has seen and revealed their "open secret." We are waked to the consciousness of the wonderful and sublime realities in them. We are lifted from the level to which conventionalism has smoothed us. We see the ideals which make life noble, nature beautiful and the spirit of a man of more worth than a world.

Of this kind of influence we have an historically renowned example in the statue of Zeus by Phidias. It was itself suggested, it is said, by Homer's famous lines:

"Then beneath his raven eyebrows

Zeus Kronion gave the nod,
And the locks ambrosial started
From the temples of the God;
Huge Olympus reeled beneath him,
Root and summit, rock and sod.”

Its powerful effect on Greeks and Romans who saw it is described by Winckelmann in his "History of Art." Goethe says of it in his "Winckelmann:"

"If a work of art is once produced, and does it stand in enduring reality before the world, then it produces an enduring effect the highest possible. For inasmuch as it develops itself spiritually out of the collective powers, it resumes into itself everything noble, or worthy of reverence and love, and raises man above himself by embodying a soul in a human form; expands the sphere of his life and acts and divinizes

him as far as concerns the Present; in which, indeed, the Past and the Future are included. With such emotions were those seized who looked on the Olympian Jupiter, as we can well understand from the descriptions, accounts and testimonies of the ancients. The god had become a man in order to raise the man into a god. The eye beheld the highest type of dignity and was inspired for the highest beauty. In this sense we may admit that those of the ancients were right who declared with full conviction that it was a misfortune to die without having seen this work."*

45. Esthetics and Theism.

The idea of Beauty unfolded in its full significance discloses the idea of God.

It has been shown that all thought rests ultimately on the knowledge of the universal and unchanging. In the background of all consciousness of the phenomenal, the transitory and the individual, is the knowledge of the abiding, the unchanging and the universal. So in every individual form of beauty is a revelation of beauty abiding, unchanging and universal. In affirming this I only affirm as underlying the idea of the beautiful that universal and absolute reality which underlies every idea of reason, and is the ultimate ground of the possibility of rational thought. Whether we look at nature speculatively, ethically, religiously or aesthetically, we see the spirit "ever weaving at the whizzing loom of time the living clothing of the Deity" by which we see him.

That the True and the Right involve the idea of God has been established. But the perfection which beauty reveals is the conformity of the being with the truth and the law of reason. In it truth and right are revealed in unity. All beauty is spiritual beauty; it is the revelation of reason; and, as it is the revelation of perfection in which truth and law are expressed in unity, in it the absolute and perfect Reason seems to look us directly in the face and to reveal itself immediately to our spiritual vision.

It is also evident that there must be a universal and unchanging standard of the beautiful; but such a standard is possible only if that which is supreme and absolute in the universe is Reason.

Also there are orders of beauty, ascending with the orders of being. A finite being, perfect in its kind, may on account of its limitations, be destitute of perfections peculiar to another and higher kind. A beautiful rose cannot have the spreading majesty of an oak, and an aged dog cannot have the intellectual and spiritual beauty of an aged and venerable man. Our ideals of perfection rise in an ascending series till the mind rests in the all-perfect and all-glorious God. "The

Sämmtliche Werke, Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1855, Vol. V., pp. 211, 212.

ideal!" exclaims Cousin, "behold the mysterious ladder which enables the soul to mount from the finite to the Infinite."*

In the emotion of sublimity the soul is awed with the conscious presence of a greatness which transcends it, and is moved to worship. Similar, though less noticed, is the influence of the emotion of beauty at the revelation of transcendent perfection. Hildebert, Bishop of Rheims, early in the twelfth century, was filled with admiration of the statues of the gods which then abounded in Rome; and in uttering his admiration he declared that these works of human genius lift us above all heathen gods, and that by looking at them the heathen gods themselves might learn what it is to be divine and might long to be like them:

"Hic superûm formas superi mirantur et ipsi,
Et cupiunt fictis vultibus esse pares.
Non potuit natura deos hoc ore creare,

46.

Quæ miranda deûin signa creavit homo.

Vultus adest his numinibus, potiusque coluntur
Artificum studio, quam deitate sua."†

Erroneous Theories of Esthetics.

I. A great variety of erroneous theories of æsthetics have been published, characterized by superficial and confused thought, and some of them puerile and laughable. Such is Burke's theory, in the "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful," that "beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system" and that "the genuine constituents of beauty have each of them, separately taken, a natural tendency to relax the fibres." Hence he emphasizes smoothness as pre-eminently a quality of beautiful objects; he says, "I do not now recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth;" and explains it by its effect in relaxing the muscles. An example which he gives us is, "A bed smoothly laid and soft" . . . . . because it "is a great luxury disposing to a universal relaxation, and inducing beyond anything else that species of it called sleep."§ These theorizers err in a manner analogous to the error of a physician who prescribes for symptoms without inquiring for the causes of the disease. They construct their theories from some trait of a particular object which pleases, without ascertaining the principle which declares what beauty is. Of these theories I consider but two.

II. The first is the theory that objects are beautiful because they have become associated with previous agreeable feelings. Mr. Jeffrey states it thus: "Our sense of beauty depends entirely on our previous

* Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien, Lect. IX.

† Quoted by Bunsen, with a translation which fails to give the chief point of significance. God in History, Vol. II., p. 268, Winkworth's Translation.

Part IV., Section 19.

? Part III., Section 14, and IV., Section 20.