Aesthetic Poetry | Page 3

it has not
the true character of the beautiful. Again, order is a less mathematical
idea than proportion, but it does not explain what is free and flowing in
certain beauties.
The most plausible theory of beauty is that which makes it consist in
two contrary and equally necessary elements--unity and variety. A
beautiful flower has all the elements we have named; it has unity,
symmetry, and variety of shades of color. There is no beauty without
life, and life is movement, diversity. These elements are found in
beautiful and also in sublime objects. A beautiful object is complete,
finished, limited with symmetrical parts. A sublime object whose forms,
though not out of proportion, are less determined, ever awakens in us
the feeling of the infinite. In objects of sense all qualities that can
produce the feeling of the beautiful come under one class called
physical beauty. But above and beyond this in the region of mind we
have first intellectual beauty, including the laws that govern
intelligence and the creative genius of the artist, the poet, and the
philosopher. Again, the moral world has beauty in its ideas of liberty,
of virtue, of devotion, the justice of Aristides, the heroism of Leonidas.
We have now ascertained that there is beauty and sublimity in nature,
in ideas, in feelings, and in actions. After all this it might be supposed
that a unity could be found amidst these different kinds of beauty. The
sight of a statue, as the Apollo of Belvedere, of a man, of Socrates
expiring, are adduced as producing impressions of the beautiful; but the
form cannot be a form by itself, it must be the form of something.
Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral
beauty which is the basis, the principle, and the unity of the beautiful.
Physical beauty is an envelop to intellectual and to moral beauty.
Intellectual beauty, the splendor of the true, can only have for principle
that of all truth.

Moral beauty comprehends two distinct elements, equally beautiful,
justice and charity. Thus God is the principle of the three orders of
beauty, physical, intellectual, and moral. He also construes the two
great powers distributed over the three orders, the beautiful and the
sublime. God is beauty par excellence; He is therefore perfectly
beautiful; He is equally sublime. He is to us the type and sense of the
two great forms of beauty. In short, the Absolute Being as absolute
unity and absolute variety is necessarily the ultimate principle, the
extreme basis, the finished ideal of all beauty. This was the marvellous
beauty which Diotimus had seen, and which is described in the Banquet
of Socrates.
It is our purpose after the previous discussion to attempt to elucidate
still further the idea of art by following its historic development.
Many questions bearing on art and relating to the beautiful had been
propounded before, even as far back as Plotinus, Plato, and Socrates,
but recent times have been the real cradle of aesthetics as a science.
Modern philosophy was the first to recognize that beauty in art is one
of the means by which the contradictions can be removed between
mind considered in its abstract and absolute existence and nature
constituting the world of sense, bringing back these two factors to
unity.
Kant was the first who felt the want of this union and expressed it, but
without determining its conditions or expressing it scientifically. He
was impeded in his efforts to effect this union by the opposition
between the subjective and the objective, by his placing practical
reason above theoretical reason, and he set up the opposition found in
the moral sphere as the highest principle of morality. Reduced to this
difficulty, all that Kant could do was to express the union under the
form of the subjective ideas of reason, or as postulates to be deduced
from the practical reason, without their essential character being known,
and representing their realization as nothing more than a simple you
ought, or imperative "Du sollst."
In his teleological judgment applied to living beings, Kant comes, on
the contrary, to consider the living organism in such wise that, the

general including the particular, and determining it as an end,
consequently the idea also determines the external, the compound of
the organs, not by an act springing from without but issuing from
within. In this way the end and the means, the interior and exterior, the
general and particular, are confounded in unity. But this judgment only
expresses a subjective act of reflection, and does not throw any light on
the object in itself. Kant has the same view of the aesthetic judgment.
According to him the judgment does not proceed either from reason, as
the faculty of general ideas, or from sensuous