ÆSTHETICS.
The science of the beautiful is an important and delightful branch of study; the knowledge gained being mostly through immediate perceptions and sensible impressions. Beauty, wherever discovered, appeals to the sensibilities, and raises pleasant emotions. As a means of culture it elevates and refines. Communings with nature in her lovelier moods subdue asperities, and inspire gentle, kindly dispositions, while the beautiful creations of architecture, statuary, and painting, of poetry and music, fill the souls of discerning, susceptible persons with indescribable pleasure. But though such emotions are frequently excited, and seem familiar, they are of all our mental phenomena least understood, and most difficult to analyze. Some of our most common experiences are, on examination, found the most inexplicable. All, in a general way, know that beauty of form, proportion and color, wherever seen, excites pleasurable emotions. But our knowledge of sensations and emotions is generally, though direct and immediate, imperfect, and can become thorough only when the first impression is retained, and the higher faculties employed in studying its character and its cause. Dr. Porter’s[2] chapters on “Sense Perceptions” are, on the whole, satisfactory, and will help advance this branch of knowledge toward the dignity of a science. They give an analysis of beauty in objects that address the senses, and also of the emotions it awakens. Thoughtful students confess their need of more help. The science has its charms, but is still in its adolescence. Some things elementary are yet wanting, or known only by the names given them. Men talk of the “line of beauty” in architecture and sculpture, but do not yet know just what it is, or by what peculiarities it works on the sympathies of the beholder. We feel the exquisite pleasure but do not know just wherein the charms of the music that most delights us, consist, nor how it awakens the feeling it does. We can not tell just what it is in the poem we admire that gives its rhythm, figures of speech and imagery such enchanting power. The literature on the subject is extensive. We have, as all who read Ruskin’s[3] works know, a rich treasure of astute observations, with keen, incisive criticisms, but yet no thorough analysis of all the materials necessary to complete the science of Æsthetics.