How these aids are possible we have been informed from what has been said. Expressions or representations are also practical facts, which are also called physical in so far as physics classifies and reduces them to types. Now it is clear that if we can succeed in making those practical or physical facts somehow permanent, it will always be possible (all other conditions remaining equal) on perceiving them to reproduce in ourselves the already produced expression or intuition.
If that be called the object or physical stimulus in which the practical concomitant acts, or (to use physical terms) in which the movements have been isolated and made in some sort permanent, and if that object or stimulus be designated by the letter e; the process of reproduction will take place in the following order: e, the physical stimulus; d-b, perception of physical facts (sounds, tones, mimetic, combinations of lines and colours, etc.), which is together the æsthetic synthesis, already produced; c, the hedonistic accompaniment, which is also reproduced.
And what else are those combinations of words called poetry, prose, poems, novels, romances, tragedies or comedies, but physical stimulants of reproduction (the stage e); what else are those combinations of sound called operas, symphonies, sonatas; or those combinations of lines and colours called pictures, statues, architecture? The spiritual energy of memory, with the assistance of the physical facts above mentioned, makes possible the preservation and the reproduction of the intuitions produced by man. The physiological organism and with it the memory become weakened; the monuments of art are destroyed, and lo, all that æsthetic wealth, the fruit of the labours of many generations, diminishes and rapidly disappears.
Physical beauty.
Monuments of art, the stimulants of æsthetic reproduction, are called beautiful things or physical beauty. This combination of words constitutes a verbal paradox, for the beautiful is not a physical fact; it does not belong to things, but to the activity of man, to spiritual energy. But it is now clear through what transferences and associations, physical things and facts which are simply aids to the reproduction of the beautiful are finally called elliptically beautiful things and physical beauty. And now that we have explained this elliptical usage, we shall ourselves employ it without hesitation.
Content and form: another meaning.
The intervention of "physical beauty" serves to explain another meaning of the words "content" and "form," as used by æstheticians. Some call "content" the internal fact or expression (for us, on the other hand, form), and "form" the marble, the colours, the rhythm, the sounds (for us the antithesis of form); thus looking upon the physical fact as the form, which may or may not be joined to the content. It also serves to explain another aspect of what is called æsthetic "ugliness." Somebody who has nothing definite to express may try to conceal his internal emptiness in a flood of words, in sounding verse, in deafening polyphony, in painting that dazzles the eye, or by heaping together great architectural masses which arrest and astonish us without conveying anything whatever. Ugliness, then, is the capricious, the charlatanesque; and, in reality, if practical caprice did not intervene in the theoretic function, there might be absence of beauty, but never the real presence of something deserving the adjective "ugly."
Natural and artificial beauty.
Physical beauty is usually divided into natural and artificial beauty. Thus we reach one of the facts which have given the greatest trouble to thinkers: natural beauty. These words often designate facts of merely practical pleasure. Any one who calls a landscape beautiful where the eye rests upon verdure, where the body moves briskly and the warm sun envelops and caresses the limbs, does not speak of anything æsthetic. But it is nevertheless indubitable that on other occasions the adjective "beautiful," applied to objects and scenes existing in nature, has a completely æsthetic signification.
It has been observed that in order to enjoy natural objects æsthetically, we must abstract from their external and historical reality, and separate their simple semblance or appearance from existence; that if we contemplate a landscape with our head between our legs, so as to cancel our wonted relations with it, the landscape appears to us to be an ideal spectacle; that nature is beautiful only for him who contemplates her with the eye of the artist; that zoologists and botanists do not recognize beautiful animals and flowers; that natural beauty is discovered (and examples of discovery are the points of view, pointed out by men of taste and imagination, to which more or less æsthetic travellers and excursionists afterwards have recourse in pilgrimage, whence a kind of collective suggestion); that, without the aid of the imagination, no part of nature is beautiful, and that with such aid the same natural object or fact is, according to the disposition of the soul, now expressive, now insignificant, now expressive of one definite thing, now of another, sad or glad, sublime or ridiculous, sweet or laughable; finally, that a natural beauty which an artist would not to some extent correct, does not exist.