“And that same dew, which sometimes on the buds
Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty floweret’s eyes,
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail,”—
the poet introduces a new element of beauty equally legitimate, yet altogether distinct from, although accompanying that which constitutes the more precise science of æsthetics as here defined. The composition of the rhythm is an operation of the understanding, but the beauty of the poetic fancy is an operation of the imagination.
Our physical and mental powers, æsthetically considered, may therefore be classed under three heads, in their relation to the fine arts, viz., the receptive, the perceptive, and the conceptive.
The senses of hearing and seeing are respectively, in the degree of their physical power, receptive of impressions made upon them, and of these impressions the sensorium, in the degree of its mental power, is perceptive. This perception enables the mind to form a judgment whereby it appreciates the nature and quality of the impression originally made on the receptive organ. The mode of this operation is intuitive, and the quickness and accuracy with which the nature and quality of the impression is apprehended, will be in the degree of the intellectual vigour of the mind by which it is perceived. Thus we are, by the cultivation of these intuitive faculties, enabled to decide with accuracy as to harmony or discord, proportion or deformity, and assign sound reasons for our judgment in matters of taste. But mental conception is the intuitive power of constructing original ideas from these materials; for after the receptive power has acted, the perception operates in establishing facts, and then the judgment is formed upon these operations by the reasoning powers, which lead, in their turn, to the creations of the imagination.
The power of forming these creations is the true characteristic of genius, and determines the point at which art is placed beyond all determinable canons,—at which, indeed, æsthetics give place to metaphysics.
In the science of beauty, therefore, the human mind is the subject, and the effect of external nature, as well as of works of art, the object. The external world, and the individual mind, with all that lies within the scope of its powers, may be considered as two separate existences, having a distinct relation to each other. The subject is affected by the object, through that inherent faculty by which it is enabled to respond to every development of the all-governing harmonic law of nature; and the media of communication are the sensorium and its inlets—the organs of sense.
This harmonic law of nature was either originally discovered by that illustrious philosopher Pythagoras, upwards of five hundred years before Christ, or a knowledge of it obtained by him about that period, from the Egyptian or Chaldean priests. For after having been initiated into all the Grecian and barbarian sacred mysteries, he went to Egypt, where he remained upwards of twenty years, studying in the colleges of its priests; and from Egypt he went into the East, and visited the Persian and Chaldean magi.[3]