Part 10 (2/2)

By doing so we render reality unintelligible; we destroy the fundamental ground of any possible distinction between good and evil, thus rendering both alike inconceivable. Each is correlative to the other; we cannot understand the one without the other. If, therefore, goodness is an aspect of real being, and identical with reality, evil must be a negation of reality, and cannot be made intelligible otherwise.

Finally, the Manichean conception of two Supreme, Self-Existent, Independent First Principles is obviously self-contradictory. As is shown in Natural Theology, Being that is absolutely Supreme, Self-Existent and Necessary, must by Its very nature be unique: there could not be two such Beings.

CHAPTER VII. REALITY AND THE BEAUTIFUL.

53. THE CONCEPT OF THE BEAUTIFUL FROM THE STANDPOINT OF EXPERIENCE.-Truth and Goodness characterize reality as related to intellect and to will.

Intimately connected with these notions is that of _the beautiful_,(193) which we must now briefly a.n.a.lyse. The fine arts have for their common object the expression of the beautiful; and the department of philosophy which studies these, the philosophy of the beautiful, is generally described as _Esthetics_.(194)

Like the terms ”true” and ”good,” the term ”beautiful” (?a???; _pulchrum_, _beau_, _schon_, etc.) is familiar to all. To reach a definition of it let us question experience. What do men commonly mean when, face to face with some object or event, they say ”That is _beautiful_”? They give expression to this sentiment in the presence of a natural object such as a landscape revealing mountain and valley, lake and river and plain and woodland, glowing in the golden glow of the setting sun; or in contemplating some work of art-painting, sculpture, architecture, music: the _Sistine Madonna_, the _Moses_ of Michael Angelo, the Cathedral of _Notre Dame_, a symphony of Beethoven; or some literary masterpiece: Shakespeare's _Macbeth_, or Dante's _Divina Commedia_, or Newman's _Apologia_, or Kickham's _Knocknagow_. There are other things the sight of which arouses no such sentiment, but leaves us indifferent; and others again, the sight of which arouses a contrary sentiment, to which we give expression by designating them as ”commonplace,” ”vulgar,” ”ugly”. The sentiment in question is one of _pleasure_ and _approval_, or of _displeasure_ and _disapproval_.

Hence the first fact to note is that _the beautiful pleases us_, _affects us agreeably_, while the commonplace or the ugly leaves us indifferent or _displeases us_, _affects us disagreeably_.

But the _good_ pleases us and affects us agreeably. Is the beautiful, then, identical with the good? No; the really beautiful is indeed always good; but not everything that is good is beautiful; nor is the pleasure aroused by the good identical with that aroused by the beautiful. Whatever gratifies the lower sense appet.i.tes and causes organic pleasure is good-_bonum delectabile_-but is not deemed beautiful. Eating and drinking, resting and sleeping, indulging the senses of touch, taste and smell, are indeed pleasure-giving, but they have no a.s.sociation with the beautiful.

Again, the deformed child may be the object of the mother's special love.

But the pleasure thus derived from the good, as the object of appet.i.te, desire, delight, is not esthetic pleasure. If we examine the latter, the pleasure caused by the beautiful, we shall find that it is invariably a pleasure peculiar to _knowledge_, to apprehension, perception, imagination, contemplation. Hence in the domain of the senses we designate as ”beautiful” only what can be apprehended by the two higher senses, seeing and hearing, which approximate most closely to intellect, and which, through the imagination, furnish data for _contemplation_ to the intellect.(195) This brings us to St. Thomas's definition: _Pulchra sunt quae visa placent_: those things are beautiful whose vision pleases us,-where vision is to be understood in the wide sense of apprehension, contemplation.(196) The owner of a beautiful demesne, or of an art treasure, may derive pleasure from his sense of proprietors.h.i.+p; but this is distinct from the esthetic pleasure that may be derived by others, no less than by himself, from the mere contemplation of those objects.

Esthetic pleasure is disinterested: it springs from the mere _contemplation_ of an object as beautiful; whereas the pleasure that springs from the object as good is an interested pleasure, a pleasure of _possession_. No doubt the beautiful is really identical with the good, though logically distinct from the latter.(197) The _orderliness_ which we shall see to be the chief objective factor of beauty, is itself a perfection of the object, and as such is good and desirable. Hence the beautiful can be an object of interested desire, but only under the aspect of goodness. Under the aspect of beauty the object can excite only the disinterested esthetic pleasure of contemplation.

But if esthetic pleasure is derived from contemplation, is not this identifying the beautiful with the true, and supplanting art by science?

Again the consequence is inadmissible; for not every pleasure peculiar to knowledge is esthetic. There is a pleasure in seeking and discovering truth, the pleasure which gratifies the scholar and the scientist: the pleasure of the philologist in tracing roots and paradigms, of the chemist in a.n.a.lysing unsavoury materials, of the anatomist in exploring the structure of organisms _post mortem_. But these things are not ”beautiful”. The really beautiful is indeed always true, but it cannot well be maintained that all truths are beautiful. That two and two are four is a truth, but in what intelligible sense could it be said to be beautiful?

But besides the scientific pleasure of seeking and discovering truth, there is the pleasure which comes from contemplating the object known. The aim of the scientist or scholar is _to discover truth_; that of the artist is, through knowledge to derive complacency from _contemplating the thing known_. The scientist or scholar may be also an artist, or _vice versa_; but the scientist's pleasure proper lies exclusively in discovering truth, whereas that of the artist lies in contemplating something apprehended, imagined, conceived. The artist is not concerned as to whether what he apprehends is real or imaginary, certain or conjectural, but only as to whether or how far the contemplation of it will arouse emotions of pleasure, admiration, enthusiasm; while the scientist's supreme concern is to know things, to see them as they are. The beautiful, then, is always true, either as actual or as ideal; but the true is beautiful only when it so reveals itself as to arouse in us the desire to see or hear it, to consider it, to dwell and rest in the contemplation of it.

Let us accept, then, the _a posteriori_ definition of the beautiful as _that which it is pleasing to contemplate_; and before inquiring what precisely is it, on the side of the object, that makes the latter agreeable to contemplate, let us examine the subjective factors and conditions of esthetic experience.

54. THE ESTHETIC SENTIMENT. APPREHENSION OF THE BEAUTIFUL.-We have seen that both the appet.i.tive and the cognitive faculties are involved in the experience of the beautiful. Contemplation implies cognition; while the feeling of pleasure, complacency, satisfaction, delight, indicates the operation of appet.i.te or will. Now the notion of the beautiful, like all our notions, has its origin in sense experience; but it is itself suprasensible for it is reached by abstraction, and this is above the power of sense faculties. While the senses and imagination apprehend beautiful objects the intellect attains to that which makes these objects beautiful, to the _ratio pulchri_ that is in them. No doubt, the perception or imagination of beautiful things, in nature or in art, produces as its natural concomitant, a feeling of sensible pleasure. To hear sweet music, to gaze on the brilliant variety of colours in a gorgeous pageant, to inhale delicious perfumes, to taste savoury dishes-all such experiences gratify the senses. But the feeling of such sensible pleasure is quite distinct from the esthetic enjoyment which accompanies the apprehension of the beautiful; though it is very often confounded with the latter. Such _sentient_ states of agreeable feeling are mainly _pa.s.sive_, organic, physiological; while esthetic enjoyment, the appreciation of the beautiful, is eminently _active_. It implies the operation of a suprasensible faculty, the _intelligence_; it accompanies the reaction of the latter faculty to some appropriate objective stimulus of the suprasensible, intelligible order, to some ”idea” embodied in the object of sense.(198)

The error of confounding esthetic enjoyment with mere organic sense pleasure is characteristic of all sensist and materialist philosophies. A feeling of sensible gratification always, no doubt, accompanies our apprehension and enjoyment of the beautiful; for just as man is not a merely sentient being so neither is he a pure intelligence. Beauty reaches him through the senses; in order that an object be beautiful for him, in order that the contemplation of it may please him, it must be in harmony with his whole _human_ nature, which is both sentient and intelligent; it must, therefore, be agreeable to the senses and imagination as well as to the intellect. ”There is no painting,” writes M. Brunetiere,(199) ”but should be above all a joy to the eye! no music but should be a delight for the ear!” Otherwise we shall not apprehend in it the order, perfection, harmony, adaptation to human nature, whereby we p.r.o.nounce an object beautiful and rejoice in the contemplation of it. And it is this intellectual activity that is properly esthetic. ”What makes us consider a colour beautiful,” writes Bossuet,(200) is the secret judgment we p.r.o.nounce upon its adaptation to the eye which it pleases. Beautiful sounds, songs, cadences, have a similar adaptation to the ear. To apprehend this adaptation promptly and accurately is what is described as having a good ear, though properly speaking this judgment should be attributed to the intellect.

According to some the esthetic sentiment, the appreciation and enjoyment of the beautiful, is an exclusively subjective experience, an emotional state which has all its sources within the conscious subject, and which has no real, extramental correlative in things. According to others beauty is already in the extramental reality independently of any subjective conditions, and has no mental factors in its const.i.tution as an object of experience. Both of these extreme views are erroneous. Esthetic pleasure, like all pleasure, is the natural concomitant of the full, orderly, normal exercise of the subject's conscious activities. These activities are called forth by, and exercised upon, some _object_. For esthetic pleasure there must be in the object something the contemplation of which will elicit such harmonious exercise of the faculties. Esthetic pleasure, therefore, cannot be purely subjective: there must be an objective factor in its realization. But on the other hand this objective factor cannot provoke esthetic enjoyment independently of the dispositions of the subject. It must be in harmony with those dispositions-cognitive, appet.i.tive, affective, emotional, temperamental-in order to evoke such a mental view of the object that the contemplation of the latter will cause esthetic pleasure. And it is precisely because these dispositions, which are so variable from one individual to another, tinge and colour the mental view, while this in turn determines the quality of the esthetic judgment and feeling, that people disagree and dispute interminably about questions of beauty in art and nature. Herein beauty differs from truth.

No doubt people dispute about the latter also; but at all events they recognize its objective character and the propriety of an appeal to the independent, impersonal standard of evidence. Not so, however, in regard to beauty: _De gustibus non est disputandum_: there is no disputing about tastes. The perception of beauty, the judgment that something is or is not beautiful, is the product of an act of _taste_, _i.e._ of the individual's intelligence affected by numerous concrete personal dispositions both of the sentient and of the spiritual order, not only cognitive and appet.i.tive but temperamental and emotional. Moreover, besides this variety in subjective dispositions, we have to bear in mind the effects of artistic culture, of educating the taste. The eye and the ear, which are the two main channels of data for the intellect, can be made by training more delicate and exacting, so that the same level of esthetic appreciation can be maintained only by a constantly increasing measure of artistic stimulation. Finally, apart from all that a beautiful object _directly conveys_ to us for contemplation, there is something more which it may _indirectly suggest_: it arouses a distinct activity of the imagination whereby we fill up, in our own individual degree and according to our own interpretation, what has not been actually supplied in it by nature or art.

All those influences account sufficiently for the subjectivity and variability of the esthetic sentiment, for diversity of artistic tastes among individuals, for the transitions of fas.h.i.+on in art from epoch to epoch and from race to race. But it must not be concluded that the subjective factors in the const.i.tution of the beautiful are wholly changeable. Since human nature is fundamentally the same in all men there ought to be a fund of esthetic judgments and pleasures common to all; there ought to be in nature and in art some things which are recognized and enjoyed as beautiful by all. And there are such. In matters _of detail_ the maxim holds: _De gustibus non disputandum_. But there are fundamental esthetic judgments for which it does not hold. Since men have a common nature, and since, as we shall see presently, there are recognizable and stable objective factors to determine esthetic judgments, there is a legitimate foundation on which to discuss and establish some esthetic canons of universal validity.

55. OBJECTIVE FACTORS IN THE CONSt.i.tUTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL.-”Ask the artist,” writes St. Augustine,(201) ”whether beautiful things are beautiful because they please us, or rather please us because they are beautiful, and he will reply unhesitatingly that they please us because they are beautiful.” What, then is it that makes them beautiful, and so causes the esthetic pleasure we experience in contemplating them? In order that an object produce pleasure of any sort in a conscious being it must evoke the exercise of this being's faculties; for the conscious condition which we describe as pleasure is always a reflex of conscious activity.

Furthermore, this activity must be _full_ and _intense_ and _well-ordered_: if it be excessive or defective, if it be ill-regulated, wrongly distributed among the faculties, it will not have pleasure for its reflex, but either indifference or pain.

Hence the object which evokes the esthetic pleasure of contemplation must in the _first_ place be _complete_ or _perfect_ of its kind (46). The truncated statue, the stunted oak, the deformed animal, the crippled human being, are not beautiful. They are wanting in the integrity due to their nature.

But this is not enough. To be beautiful, the object must in the _second_ place have a certain _largeness_ or amplitude, a certain greatness or power, whereby it can act _energetically_ on our cognitive faculties and stimulate them to _vigorous_ action. The little, the trifling, the commonplace, the insignificant, evokes no feeling of admiration. The sight of a small pasture-field leaves us indifferent; but the vision of vast expanses of meadow and cornfield and woodland exhilarates us. A collection of petty hillocks is uninteresting, while the towering snow-clad Alps are magnificent. The multiplication table elicits no emotion; but the triumphant discovery and proof of some new truth in science, some far-reaching theorem that opens up new vistas of research or sheds a new light on long familiar facts, may fill the mind with ecstasies of pure esthetic enjoyment.(202) There is no moral beauty in helping up a child that has stumbled and fallen in the mud, but there is in risking one's life to save the child from burning or drowning. There must, then, be in the object a certain largeness which will secure energy of appeal to our cognitive faculties; but this energy must not be excessive, it must not dazzle, it must be in proportion to the capacity of our faculties.(203)

A _third_ requisite for beauty is that the object be in itself _duly proportioned_, _orderly_, _well arranged_. _Order_ generally may be defined as right or proper arrangement. We can see in things a twofold order, _dynamic_, or that of _subordination_, and _static_, or that of _co-ordination_: the right arrangement of means towards ends, and the right arrangement of parts in a whole, or members in a system. The former indicates the influence of _final_ causes and expresses primarily the _goodness_ of things. The latter is determined by the _formal_ causes of things and expresses primarily their _beauty_. The order essential to beauty consists in this, that the manifold and distinct things or acts which contribute to it must form one whole. Hence order has been defined as _unity in variety_: _unitas in varietate_; variety being the material cause, and unity the formal cause, of order. But we can apprehend unity in a variety of things only on condition that they are _arranged_, _i.e._ that they show forth clearly to the mind a set of mutual relations which can be easily grasped. Why is it that things mutually related to one another in one way make up what we declare to be a chaotic jumble, while if related in another way we declare them to be orderly? Because unless these relations present themselves in a certain way they will fail to unify the manifold for us. We have an intellectual intuition of the numerical series; and of _proportion_, which is equality of numerical relations. In the domains of magnitude and mult.i.tude the mind naturally seeks to detect these proportions. So also in the domains of sensible qualities, such as sounds and colours, we have an a.n.a.logous intuition of a qualitative series, and we naturally try to detect _harmony_, which is the gradation of qualitative relations in this series. The detection of _proportion_ and _harmony_ in a _variety_ of things pleases us, because we are thus enabled to grasp the manifold as exhibiting _unity_; while the absence of these elements leaves us with the dissatisfied feeling of something wanting. Whether this be because order in things is the expression of an intelligent will, of purpose and design, and therefore calls forth our intelligent and volitional activity, with its consequent and connatural feeling of satisfaction, we do not inquire here. But certain it is that order is essential to beauty, that esthetic pleasure springs only from the contemplation of proportion and harmony, which give unity to variety.(204) And the explanation of this is not far to seek. For the full and vigorous exercise of contemplative activity we need objective variety. Whatever lacks variety, and stimulates us in one uniform manner, becomes monotonous and causes _ennui_. While on the other hand mere multiplicity distracts the mind, disperses and weakens attention, and begets fatigue. We must, therefore, have variety, but variety combined with the unity that will concentrate and sustain attention, and thus call forth the highest and keenest energy of intellectual activity. Hence the function of rhythm in music, poetry and oratory; of composition and perspective in painting; of design in architecture.

The more perfect the relations are which const.i.tute order, the more _clearly_ will the unity of the object _s.h.i.+ne forth_; hence the more fully and easily will it be grasped, and the more intense the esthetic pleasure of contemplating it.

St. Thomas thus sums up the objective conditions of the beautiful: _integrity_ or _perfection_, _proportion_ or _harmony_, and _clarity_ or _splendour_.(205)

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