It gains thus a sense of liberation from the boundaries of its own personality and a sense of liberation from the boundaries of all personality. The doctrine, therefore, that the visible universe is a mysterious complex of many concentrated mortal visions, stamped, so to speak, with the "imprimatur" of an ideal immortal vision, is a doctrine that seems to impede and oppose such a temperament in this abysmal plunge into the ocean of existence. But my answer to the protest of this temperament—and it is an answer that has a certain measure of authority, since this temperament is no other than my own—is that this feeling of "imprisonment" is due to a superficial understanding of the doctrine against which it protests. It is superficial because it does not recognize that around, above, beneath, within, every form of personality that the "curve of space" covers, there is present the aboriginal "world-stuff," unfathomable and inexplicable, out of which all souls draw the material element of their being, in which all souls come into contact with one another, and from which all souls half-create and half-discover their personal universe.
It was necessary to introduce this question of temperamental reaction just here, because in any conclusion as to the nature of Beauty it is above all things important to give complete satisfaction to every great recurrent exigency of human desire. And this desire for liberation from the bonds of personality is one of the profoundest instincts of personality.
We have now arrived at a point of vantage from which it is possible to survey the outlines of our final problem; the problem, namely as to what it really is which renders one object in nature more beautiful than another object, and one work of art more beautiful than another work of art. We know that in the intuitive judgment which affixes these relative valuations there must be the three elements of mortal subjective vision, of immortal objective vision, and of the original "world-stuff" out of which all visions are made.
But upon what criteria, by what rules and standards, do we become aware that one tree is more beautiful than another tree, one landscape than another landscape, one poem or person or picture than another of the same kind? The question has already been lifted out of the sphere of pure subjective taste by what has been said with regard to the eternal Ideal vision. But are there any permanent laws of Beauty by which we may analyse the verdict of this objective vision? Or are we made aware of it, in each individual case, by a pure intuitive apprehension?
I think there are such laws. But I think the "science," so to say, of the aesthetic judgment remains at present in so rudimentary a stage that we are not in a position to do more than indicate their general outline. The following principles seem, as far as I am able to lay hold upon this evasive problem, of more comprehensive application than any others.
A thing to be beautiful must form an organic totality, even though in some other sense it is only a portion of a larger totality.
It must carry with it the impression, illusive or otherwise, that it is the outward form or shape of a living personal soul.
It must satisfy, at least by symbolic association, the physical desires of the body.
It must obey certain hidden laws of rhythm, proportion, balance, and harmony, both with regard to colour and form, and with regard to magical suggestiveness.
It must answer, in some degree, the craving of the human mind for some symbolic expression of the fatality of human experience.