The Beautiful
Beauty is that reason itself which presides at the creation of things. It is the invincible power which attracts and subjugates us in it. The Beautiful admits of three characters, which we distinguish under the titles of ideal beauty, moral beauty, plastic beauty.
Plato defined ideal beauty when he said: "Beauty is the splendor of truth." St. Augustine said of moral beauty that it is the splendor of goodness. I define plastic beauty as the plastic manifestation of truth and goodness.
In so far as it responds to the particular type in accordance with which it is formed, every creature bears the crown of beauty; because in its correspondence with its type it manifests, according to its capacity, the Divine Being who created it.
The Beautiful is an absolute principle; it is the essence of beings, the life of their functions. Beauty is a consequence, an effect, a form of the Beautiful. It results from the attractions of the form. The attraction of the form comes from the nobility of the function. This is why all functions not being equally noble, all do not admit of beauty. The characteristic of beauty is to be amiable; consequently a thing is ugly only in view of the amiable things which we seek in beauty.
Beauty is to the Beautiful what the individual reason is to the Divine reason of things. Human reason is but one ray of a vast orb called the reason of things,--Divine reason. Let us say of beauty what we have said of the individual reason, and we shall understand how the Beautiful is to be distintinguished from it. Beauty is one ray of the Beautiful.
Beauty is the expression of the object for which the thing is.
It is the stamp of its functions. It is the transparency of the aptitudes of the agent and the radiance of the faculties which it governs. It is the order which results from the dynamic disposition of forms operated in view of the function.
Beauty is based on three conditions: Clearness, integrity and due proportion.
Beauty exists in the practical knowledge of the tendencies affected by the form in view of the object for which it is; in view, above all, of the action which it exerts upon the beings with whom it is in relation. Thus a thing is not only beautiful from the transparency of its aptitudes, it is especially so from the beauty of the acts which its use determines abroad. This is the reason why beauty is to all creatures an object of appetency, of desire and of love.