I do not suppose that I am exceptionally endowed because I have all my
life enjoyed a keen perception of the beauty offered us by nature and
by art Now physical science may and probably will, some day, enable our
posterity to set forth the exact physical concomitants and conditions of
the strange rapture of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture
will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond the physical world;
and, even in the mental world, something superadded to mere sensation.
I do not wish to crow unduly over my humble cousin the orang, but in
the aesthetic province, as in that of tine intellect, I am afraid he
is nowhere. I doubt not he would detect a fruit amidst a wilderness of
leaves where I could see nothing; but I am tolerably confident that he
has never been awestruck, as I have been, by the dim religious gloom, as
of a temple devoted to the earthgods, of the tropical forests which
he inhabits. Yet I doubt not that our poor long-armed and short-legged
friend, as he sits meditatively munching his durian fruit, has something
behind that sad Socratic face of his which is utterly "beyond the bounds
of physical science." Physical science may know all about his clutching
the fruit and munching it and digesting it, and how the physical
titillation of his palate is transmitted to some microscopic cells
of the gray matter of his brain. But the feelings of sweetness and of
satisfaction which, for a moment, hang out their signal lights in his
melancholy eyes, are as utterly outside the bounds of physics as is the
"fine frenzy" of a human rhapsodist.