The habit of beauty, of harmony, is but the habit, engrained in our
nature by the unnoticed experiences of centuries, of _life_ in our
surroundings and in ourselves; the habit of beauty is the habit, I
believe scientific analysis of nature's ways and means will show
us--of the growing of trees, the flowing of water, the perfect play
of perfect muscles, all registered unconsciously in the very structure
of our soul. And for this reason every time we experience afresh the
particular emotion associated with the quality _beautiful_, we are
adding to that rhythm of life within ourselves by recognising the life
of all things. There is not room within us for two conflicting waves
of emotion, for two conflicting rhythms of life, one sane and one
unsound. The two may possibly alternate, but in most cases the weaker
will be neutralised by the stronger; and, at all events, they cannot
co-exist. We can account, only in this manner, for the indisputable
fact that great emotion of a really and purely æsthetic nature has a
morally elevating quality, that as long as it endures--and in finer
organisations its effect is never entirely lost--the soul is more
clean and vigorous, more fit for high thoughts and high decisions. All
understanding, in the wider and more philosophical sense, is but a
kind of becoming: our soul experiences the modes of being which it
apprehends. Hence the particular religious quality (all faiths and
rituals taking advantage thereof) of a high and complex æsthetic
emotion. Whenever we come in contact with real beauty, we become
aware, in an unformulated but overwhelming manner, of some of the
immense harmonies of which all beauty is the product, of which all
separate beautiful things are, so to speak, the single patterns
happening to be in our line of vision, while all around other patterns
connect with them, meshes and meshes of harmonies, spread out, outside
our narrow field of momentary vision, an endless web, like the
constellations which, strung on their threads of mutual dependence,
cover and fill up infinitude.
In the moments of such emotional perception, our soul also, ourselves,
become in a higher degree organic, alive, receiving and giving out the
life of the universe; come to be woven into the patterns of harmonies,
made of the stuff of reality, homogeneous with themselves,
consubstantial with the universe, like the living plant, the flowing
stream, the flying cloud, the great picture or statue.
And in this way is realised, momentarily, but with ever-increasing
power of repetition, that which, after the teaching of Diotima,
Socrates prayed for--"the harmony between the outer and the inner
man."
But this, I know, many will say, is but a delusion. Rapture is
pleasant, but it is not necessarily, as the men of the Middle Ages
thought, a union with God. And is this the time to revive, or seek to
revive, when science is for ever pressing upon us the conclusion that
soul is a function of matter--is this the time to revive discredited
optimistic idealisms of an unscientific philosophy?
But if science become omniscient, it will surely recognise and explain
the value of such recurring optimistic idealisms; and if the soul be a
function of matter, will not science recognise but the more, that the
soul is an integral and vitally dependent portion of the material
universe?