"Can one imagine," he says, "a painter conceiving a picture and grouping his figures in such a way as to violate the rules of common sense?
"We should be doomed, if this were true, to see men as tall as oak-trees and houses resembling children's toy constructions, placed without reference to equilibrium among green or pink animals, whose legs had queer shapes.
"Madmen represent nature thus, which seems to them outlined in strange forms.
"But people of common sense reproduce things just as sound judgment conceives of them; if they throw around them at times the halo of beauty which seems exaggerated, let us not decry them.
"Beauty exists everywhere; it dwells in the most humble objects, makes all around us resplendent and, if we refuse to see it, we are blinded by an unjust prejudice, or our minds are not open to the faculty of contemplation.
"It is revealed above all to those who cultivate common sense and reject the sophistries of untruth that they may surround themselves with truth.
"Such people scorn trivial casualties; they adopt an immutable rule, reasoning, which permits them to deduce, to judge, and afterward to produce.
"All beautiful creations are derived from this source.
"The most admirable inventions would never have been known if common sense had not helped them to be produced, strengthening those who conceived them by the support of logic, which demonstrated to them the truth of their presumptions.
"Authority follows, based on the experience which, by maintaining the effect of judgment, has armed them with the strength of the mind, the true glory of peaceful conquerors."