Beauty, save by a metaphorical application of the word, is not in the
least the same thing as Goodness, any more than beauty (despite
Keats' famous assertion) is the same thing as Truth. These three
objects of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws,
and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which express
themselves in their pursuit--energies vital, primordial, and necessary
even to man's physical survival--have all been evolved under the same
stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; and
have therefore, in their beginnings and in their ceaseless growth,
been working perpetually in concert, meeting, crossing, and
strengthening one another, until they have become indissolubly woven
together by a number of great and organic coincidences.
It is these coincidences which all higher philosophy, from Plato
downwards, has strained for ever to expound. It is these coincidences,
which all religion and all poetry have taken for granted. And to three
of these it is that I desire to call attention, persuaded as I am that
the scientific progress of our day will make short work of all the
spurious æstheticism and all the shortsighted utilitarianism which
have cast doubts upon the intimate and vital connection between beauty
and every other noble object of our living.
The three coincidences I have chosen are: that between development of
the æsthetic faculties and the development of the altruistic
instincts; that between development of a sense of æsthetic harmony and
a sense of the higher harmonies of universal life; and, before
everything else, the coincidence between the preference for æsthetic
pleasures and the nobler growth of the individual.