To refute these objections, it has been thought sufficient to examine the chief conditions which are necessary, in order to appreciate properly the impression of those combinations, which woman presents, and to expose the principal circumstances which are opposed to the accuracy of opinions, and judgments respecting them.
The conditions necessary to enable us to pronounce respecting the real attributes of beauty, are, first, a temperate climate, under which nature brings to perfection all her productions, and gives to their forms and functions, generally, and to those of man in particular, all the development of which they are capable, without excess in the action of some, and defect in that of others;—secondly, in man in particular, a brain capable of vigorous thought, sound judgment, and exquisite taste;—and thirdly, a very advanced civilization, without which these faculties cannot be duly exercised or attain any perfection.
It is evident enough that none of these conditions are to be met with in the whimsical judgments and tastes of many nations.
The consequence of the absence of these conditions, in relation to the uncivilized and ignorant inhabitants of hot climates, is marked in their deeming characteristics of beauty, the thick lips of Negresses, the long and pendent mammæ of the women in several nations both of Africa and America, or the gross forms of those of Egypt.
The consequence of the absence of these conditions, in relation to the uncivilized and ignorant inhabitants of cold climates, is equally marked in their deeming characteristics of beauty the short figures of the women of icy regions, in which, deprived of the vivifying action of heat and light, living beings appear only in a state of deformity and alteration; and in their similarly deeming beautiful the obliquely-placed eyes of the Chinese and Japanese, and the crushed nose of the Calmucs, &c., &c.
Those who take these views, which are true, though somewhat vague and inconclusive, should, I think, have seen and added, that the deviations from beauty in the forms of the women of hot climates are commonly in excess, owing to the great development of organs of sense or of sex; while the deviations from beauty, in the forms of the women of cold climates, are commonly in defect, owing to the imperfect development of organs of sense, and of the general figure.
This view renders it more clear that both these kinds of deviation are deformities, incompatible with the consistent and harmonious development of the whole. And without this view, the preceding arguments are indeed too vague to be easily tenable.
In relation more especially to the second of the preceding conditions, the possession of a brain capable of vigorous thought, sound judgment, and exquisite taste, Hume observes that the same excellence of faculties which contributes to the improvement of reason, the same clearness of conception, the same exactness of distinction, the same vivacity of apprehension, are essential to the operations of true taste.
Here, again, those who take these true, but vague and inconclusive views, should, I think, have seen and added that this excellence of the thinking faculties is incompatible with the obviously constricted brain, which is a defect common both to the Negro and the Mongol—a defect which is incompatible with beauty either of form or function, and which I have shown, in my work on physiognomy, to be intimately connected with climate. This renders the argument sufficiently strong.
Those who employ these arguments as to a standard of beauty in woman, proceed to show the modes in which defects of this kind unfit persons to judge of beauty; and though their farther arguments are similarly vague, they nevertheless tend to support the truth.