(β) A profounder penetration into this correlation of the parts will, however, in the second place, tend to give us that truer insight competent to determine from one of the parts the entire form to which it must belong. Cuvier is a famous example of such aptitude: a man of science, who by the examination of a single bone, whether fossil or otherwise, was able to specify at once by its characteristics the kind of animal to which it belonged. An excellent illustration this of ex ungue leonem. So from a claw or a thigh bone we may discover the conformation of the teeth, or vice versa from the teeth that of the hip-bone, or that of the vertebral column. Such a profound synthesis of the type and the knowledge it implies carries us, however, beyond habitual experience only. We must assume, to render it possible, previous thought and the systematic arrangement of the isolated facts of science. Our example Cuvier had no doubt secured from previous experience a determinate content and some specific quality which prevailed in each generic conception, and asserted itself as a unity of principle in all particulars however distinct, and so enabled him to recognize their affinity. Such a specific quality is that of flesh-eating, which is then the determinating principle of the form of the other members of the organism to which it belongs. A flesh-eating animal requires teeth and jaws of exceptional vigour; when hunting it will require claws to seize its prey, mere hoofs are insufficient. Here in short is a quality which necessarily determines for us the form and principle of affinity among all the organic members. A conception of such a typical character is the ordinary one we form of the strength of an eagle or a lion. We may no doubt find something both beautiful and instructive[231] in this way of regarding the animal world, in so far as we derive from it some unified idea of its configuration, which is not a mere repetition of that unity in all the parts, but gives full value to the distinctions they possess. For all that it must be remembered the dominant factor of this survey is not the perception of our senses, but the generic thought of our minds with which it is made to conform. Reviewed in this light we ought not to say that we find the object as such beautiful, but rather attribute that beauty to the reflection of our own minds upon it. And if we examine these reflections more closely we shall find they are after all a deduction of our principle of unity from a limited aspect of the organic whole. We concentrate our attention, for example, on the mode in which it is nourished, i.e., whether such an animal is carnivorous or herbivorous. Through such a limited determination we are still removed from a vision of the coalescent unity of the whole we identified with the notion, the soul itself.
(γ) The truth is we can only, in this sphere, bring before our consciousness the entire unity of life by means of our thought and grasp of reason. In the natural world the soul, in its full activity, is not found; that is to say, the subjective unity, in its pure ideality, does not exist there for a self-consciousness.
If, however, by means of thought, we endeavour to grasp the nature of soul-life according to its essential notion we shall find two aspects under which we may regard it; first, as the form subject to such a principle of animation; secondly, as the notion of soul for thought in all that the conception implies. Such a complete grasp of its true nature is not possible in the sensuous perception of the objects of beauty. Such must neither pass before us as thought, nor must we allow the interest of Thought as such to form a barrier of difference or opposition between itself and the vision revealed to us. We are left, then, with no alternative but to consider, under this point of view, the object as wholly presented to sense; we must assume that in the sphere of Nature a sensuous perception of the natural form is our genuine mode of contemplating the beautiful. "Sense," that is the master-key[232] to the position; a word which in itself is interpreted in two opposed senses. In the first place we may indicate thereby the organs of immediate[233] perception, secondly, by the "sense of a thing" we may refer to the significance, or the element of thought and the universal within it. In this way "Sense" is related on one side to the immediate externality of existence, and on the other to its inward or essential nature. A sensuous perception of that existence in fact preserves both sides in unity, or rather in one direction so presents the aspect that is opposed to it in the immediate sense vision as to include therein both the essence and notion of the object. But for the reason that it combines these opposed determinations in unfractured unity, the notion is not presented as such to consciousness, but is rather to be dimly foreshadowed there[234]. We accept, for example, as a determinate fact the existence of three realms of Nature, which we define as that of the mineral world, that of plants, and finally that of animals; we can conclude from this, as already foreshadowed by its truth regarded as a process rising from plane to plane, that there is an inward necessity inherent in the notional articulation of its divisions, and do not confine ourselves only to the purely imaginative conception of it as a world conforming on its exterior side only to a final end. In the same way when confronted with the variety of the external presentment in each of these realms, the sense-perception surmises a controlling unity intelligible to mind, a progress subject to laws of thought, visible no less in the formation of mountain ranges than in the orderly succession of plant-life and of the animal races. The same tendency is presupposed when, after an examination of the form of any particular animal organism, an insect's, for example, as subdivided into head, body, abdomen, and extremities, we conclude the correlation of such parts to be based on a rational principle, and are confident that though, at first blush, it may appear quite accidental that we are in possession of five senses, we shall discover a true bond of relation between that number and the notion therein asserted. Of just this type is Goethe's method of observing and accounting for the innate reason of Nature and her phenomena. With an extraordinary intuitive sense he directed his attention directly to[235] the objects of experience, entirely convinced of the ideal bond of unity which explained their interconnection. History may be written with a like object. The narration of facts and individual lives is given in such a way as indirectly to throw a light on the essential significance which such events or persons contributed to the period in which they are necessarily bound together in one organic whole.
3. Consequently we may affirm that Nature generally, regarded as the sensuous manifestation of the concrete notion and the Idea, is to be considered an object of beauty in so far as by such a sensuous perception of natural forms some kind of foreshadowing of the notional unity consonant to them is surmised, and we are able through the channels of sense to discover not merely their form, but somewhat of the inner necessity which binds together all their parts. Further than this incomplete surmise of the notion the sensuous contemplation of Nature as beautiful is not carried. This way of comprehending things, for which the separate parts, despite their appearance of independent freedom among themselves, nevertheless reveal to the sight the harmony that exists there either in the characteristics of their form, or detached portions of it or their motion and so forth, remains for all that indefinite and abstract. The inward unity is not open to external sense, nor can it appear in its ideal and concrete form to such perception[236], whether imaginative or no; such at most acquiesces generally in the universality of a law of connection inherent in every living thing.
(a) It is, then, in the first instance only in this bond of union which reveals itself as a necessary adjunct of vitality from the objectivity of Nature, in so far as the same is presented in forms adequate to the notion, that we have before us the beauty of Nature. With this coalescence the materia is wholly identical; the form is immediately at home in the matter, as its true essence and its conforming energy[237]. This description may in fact stand for us, so far as beauty at this stage is concerned, as a general definition of it. We admire, for example, the natural form of a crystal on account of the law of uniformity it manifests, a law which through no mere action of forces external to it, but by virtue of its own specific definition and free activity, free in all its aspects as itself an object, is manifested there. For although an activity external to it could as such equally be free, yet in crystals the conformative activity is not extraneous to the object; rather it is a form operative as belonging to the mineral's innate character. We may define it as the free force of its substance, which out of its own resources informs itself and is not merely passively receptive of its environment. Consequently we find here the constituent material in its realized form as a free and independent creation. In still higher and more concrete mode the immanent form projects itself through the living organism and all its parts, in the articulate form and, above all, in its motion and its vital expression as feeling. For in this last case we have the inward vitality pregnant itself as living.
(b) It is moreover through this indeterminacy of the beauty of Nature, originating in its inward principle of animation that (α) both in virtue of the conception of life and the intuition of its true notion no less than of the habitual types conformable to its adequate presentment, we are able to distinguish between animals which are beautiful and those which are ugly. Animals incapable of vitality, such as the sloth, which creeps about with difficulty, and whose entire mode of life is suggestive of incapacity for motion or activity, offend our aesthetic sense for this very reason[238]. Activity and mobility are precisely the qualities which assert the higher ideality of life. For the same reason we condemn forms of amphibious life, certain species of fishes, crocodiles, toads, and many kinds of insects; an additional reason will influence our similar attitude to hybrid species, where confusion of form marks the passage from one determinate type to another; the ornithorhyncus is an example[239], an animal which with its mixture of bird and four-footed beast may indeed astonish us, but at the same time is repulsive to our sense of beauty. Such feelings of repulsion can no doubt be traced entirely to our habitual prepossessions which have moulded for the imagination a fixed type of animal species consonant to experience. But even so there is already actively present the intuitive surmise that the configuration of a bird, for example, is related in its parts by a necessary principle of unity, and cannot as such graft upon itself forms which belong to other species without being thereby transformed into a hybrid variety. Such abnormal deviations from type appear to us both strange and contradictory. Neither the one sided narrowness of organization, which is so defective and mean in its manifestation, that it exercises no activity over the straitened conditions of its environment, nor confusions and passages of type, which, albeit they are not so enclosed within themselves, are unable to hold fast the distinctive features of their type, belong strictly to the sphere of natural beauty.
(β) There is another sense in which we attribute beauty to Nature, namely, when we have the collective picture of a landscape before us rather than observe the living form of a simple object. Here we have no organic articulation of parts such as is derived from their notion and is presented to us as such ideal unity in spontaneous life. We have instead a rich variety of objects both organic and inorganic, which are united together on one or more planes of vision in their distinctive features, contour of mountains, winding outlines of rivers, groups of trees, huts, dwellings, palaces, and cities of mankind, ships, roadways, heaven and sea, valley and rock-cleft. We find, in addition to this variety and proceeding therefrom, a delightful or imposing harmony which appeals to our sense and interests us.
It is lastly a peculiar characteristic of the beauty of Nature that it should excite or exercise a harmonious influence over our emotional life. A mood of this kind is aroused by the stillness of moonlight, the peace of a valley, through which some brook or other meanders, the sublimity of the immeasurable storm-tossed sea, the tranquil depth of the star-strewn heavens. But the significant factor in this case is not so much to be found in the objects as in the peculiar moods they arouse in our feelings and affections. On analogous grounds we attribute beauty to animals, when the expression of their life directly suggests human qualities, such as courage, strength, cunning, good nature, and the rest. Such, no doubt, in one aspect of it, truly expresses the nature of the animals themselves; but there is also our own conception of its affinity to ourselves, and the mood in which we receive it.
(c) However much animal life, as the culminating point of natural beauty, unfolds its freest expression as a living principle, it is comparatively narrow in its range and subject to very limited qualities. The circle of such existence is a strait one; and in this the predominant interests are those of the satisfaction of natural instincts such as hunger and sex-attraction. Soul-life, regarded as the inward principle expressed through external figure, is poor, abstract, and empty of content. Add to this the consideration that this inward is not manifested at all as inward. The soul in its essential substance is not revealed by the life of Nature; it is, in fact, the determining characteristic of Nature that its soul remains shut in itself, does not, in other words, proclaim itself in its ideality. As already pointed out, the soul of an animal is not this ideal unity self-acknowledged. If it were otherwise we should have the manifestation of such personality brought home to others. Only in the self-conscious Ego do we find the ideal in its simplest terms, which is itself an ideal medium to itself, knows itself as this simple unity, and thereby endows itself with a reality, which is not limited to bodily and sensuous form, but is itself of an ideal character. Here, for the first time, reality is in possession of a form adequate to the notion; or rather the notion sets itself up as its own opposite, makes itself objectively real and finds its own realization in that objectivity. The animal life, on the contrary, is only potentially such a unity as that in which reality as bodily form is other than the ideal unity of soul. In self-consciousness we have this unity realized, whose opposing factors are constituent elements of one transparent ideality. And it is as this concrete totality of self-consciousness that the Ego is manifested to others. The forms of animal life merely enable us through imaginative perception to divine the soul's existence. Such only possess the troubled semblance of a soul, betrayed to us through the breath or exhalement which permeates the whole, gives some unity to all the members, and reveals in the entire instinctive life the first germs of an independent character. Herein lies the primary defect of the beauty of Nature, even when taken at its point of culminating form: and it is precisely this defect which will introduce us to the necessity of the Ideal as the beauty of art. But before we consider at length the nature of this Ideal, there are two determinations involved as the most immediate result of this inherent defect in natural beauty, which invite our attention.
We have stated that in the animal form the soul appears as the bond of connection within the organism and the unified point of animation only under a cloud[240] and destitute of any fully realized content. We only find there a quite indeterminate and restricted mode of soul-life. We will now consider the abstract limitations of this mode more closely.