The same thing is true of painting and poetry and sculpture. The feelings which inspire them and the feelings which they arouse in receptive souls are totally independent of the intellect.
The reason may argue that as one leg of the Venus de Milo is found by measurement to be considerably shorter than the other, it is absurd to call that a beautiful figure of a woman—or that it should excite as much admiration as a scientifically constructed statue in which all the proportions would be in accord with carefully tabulated statistics.
As a photograph of a young and healthy girl is more accurate and more pleasing in subject than a painting of an old woman, what reason is there for it to arouse less esthetic feeling than an immortal portrait by Rembrandt?
If a description of a small water course, drawn up by a surveyor and a lawyer, is exact and comprehensive, why should it not appeal to the imagination and sense of beauty more satisfactorily than a poem by Tennyson, entitled "The Brook?"
The obvious answer is that in all such questions the intellect is out of its element, trying to lay hands on something which has no tangible substance.
If this point-of-view is not enough to give your intellect food for thought and suggest its very decided limitations in the life of man, you may turn its light upon the simplest and most material sensations and feelings which belong to the animal nature and are common to all mankind.
What reason is there for my brother to dote on fried onions, while I cannot endure them? Why does my uncle like pig's feet and eels and snails, while my wife is made almost ill at the sight of them? Your intellect may tell you that you ought to like the taste of castor oil, because it is good for you; but all the intellect in the world cannot make you like the taste of castor oil.
The taste, the savor, the feel of things—whether it be in the material world, or the esthetic world, or the spiritual world—is a part of life in which the intellect is forever condemned to remain an outsider. It may be very much interested in what is going on, it may reason with the causes and effects and characteristics of what it sees; it may make suggestions to the will-power and argue against the impulses which are prompted by the feelings; but it cannot prevent the feelings, or the impulses, from being there and having their say.
The life and say of the feelings mean much to the welfare of each individual. Let us suppose that the circumstances of my life were such that I could truthfully express myself as follows:
"I feel well and strong; I feel that I love my wife devotedly and my wife returns that love; I feel immense affection for my children; I feel I would make any and every sacrifice to protect them and my wife from harm; I feel very hopeful about the future, both for my family and myself; I feel I have done my best, in accordance with my ability; I have a feeling of loyalty to my friends and a feeling of honor in my dealings with my fellow men; I feel content with my lot, in particular, and the way of the world, in general; and whether my life was evolved from a monkey and a protoplasm, or came into being as a divine and perfect conception, I feel an abiding faith in an all-wise but mysterious purpose for everything."