3630. The highest natural beauty is the universal portion of nature, i. e. Man.
Man expresses the ultimate goal or purpose of Nature's design.
3631. The terminus or goal of Nature is, in Man to revert again into herself. The human countenance most perfectly repeats the trunk, and again reverts wholly and actually into the trunk. That human countenance is beautiful, in which the vertebral column runs back again parallel with the vertebral column of the trunk. The facial vertebral column is the nose.
3632. The face is beautiful, whose nose runs parallel to the spine.
No human face has grown unto this estate, but every nose makes an acute angle with the spine. The facial angle is, as is well known, 80°.
What as yet no Man has remarked, and what is not to be remarked either without our view of the cranial signification, the old artists have felt through inspiration. They have not only made the facial angle a right angle, but have even stepped beyond this, the Romans going up to 96°, the Greeks even to 100°.
Whence comes it, that this unnatural face of the Grecian works of art, is still more beautiful than that of the Roman, when the latter comes nearer unto Nature? The reason thereof resides in the fact of the Grecian's artistic face representing Nature's design more than that of the Roman; for in the former the nose is placed quite perpendicular, or parallel to the spinal cord, and thus returns whither it has been derived.
3633. He who paints or otherwise copies Nature in a purely mechanical manner, is consequently a bungler; he is devoid of ideas, and imitates her no better than a bird does song, or an ape the postures of the human body. The province of Art is alas! not yet understood.
3634. In Man all the beauties of nature are associated or combined.
3635. Thus, Nature can be beautiful, in so far as she represents the individual ideas of Man.