Part 11 (1/2)

56. SOME DEFINITIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL.-An object is beautiful when its contemplation pleases us; and this takes place when the object, complete and entire in itself, possesses that order, harmony, proportion of parts, which will call forth the full and vigorous exercise of our cognitive activity. All this amounts to saying that the beauty of a thing is the _revelation or manifestation of its natural perfection_.(206) Perfection is thus the _foundation_ of beauty; the showing forth of this perfection is what const.i.tutes beauty _formally_. Every real being has a nature which const.i.tutes it, and activities whereby it tends to realize the purpose of its existence. Now the perfection of any nature is manifested by the proportion of its const.i.tutive parts and by the harmony of all its activities. Hence we see that order is essential to beauty because order shows forth the perfection of the beautiful. An object is beautiful in the degree in which the proportion of its parts and the harmony of its activities show forth the perfection of its nature.

Thus, starting with the subjective, _a posteriori_ definition of beauty from its effect: _beauty is that whose contemplation pleases us_-we have pa.s.sed to the objective and natural definition of beauty by its properties: _beauty is the evident integrity, order, proportion and harmony, of an object_-and thence to what we may call the _a priori_ or synthetic definition, which emphasizes the perfection revealed by the static and dynamic order of the thing: _the beauty of an object is the manifestation of its natural perfection by the proportion of its parts and the harmony of its activities_.(207)

A few samples of the many definitions that have been set forth by various authors will not be without interest. Vallet(208) defines beauty as _the splendour of perfection_. Other authors define it as _the splendour of order_. These definitions sacrifice clearness to brevity. Beauty is _the splendour of the true_. This definition, commonly attributed to Plato, but without reason, is inadequate and ambiguous. Cousin(209) defines beauty as _unity in variety_. This leaves out an essential element, the _clarity_ or _clear manifestation_ of order. Kant defines beauty as _the power an object possesses of giving free play to the imagination without transgressing the laws of the understanding_.(210) This definition emphasizes the necessary harmony of the beautiful with our cognitive faculties, and the fact that the esthetic sentiment is not capricious but subject to the laws of the understanding. It is, however, inadequate, in as much as it omits all reference to the objective factors of beauty.

57. CLa.s.sIFICATIONS. THE BEAUTIFUL IN NATURE.-All real beauty is either _natural_ or _artificial_. Natural beauty is that which characterizes what we call the ”works of Nature” or the ”works of G.o.d”. Artificial beauty is the beauty of ”works of art”.

Again, just as we can distinguish the _real_ beauty of the latter from the _ideal_ beauty which the human artist conceives in his mind as its archetype and exemplar cause, so, too, we can distinguish between the real beauty of natural things and the ideal beauty of their uncreated archetypes in the Mind of the Divine Artist.

We know that the beauty of the human artist's ideal is superior to, and never fully realized in, that of the actually achieved product of his art.

Is the same true of the natural beauty of G.o.d's works? That the works of G.o.d in general are beautiful cannot be denied; His Wisdom ”spreads beauty abroad” throughout His works; He arranges all things according to weight and number and measure:_c.u.m pondere, numero et mensura_; His Providence disposes all things strongly and sweetly: _fort.i.ter et suaviter_. But while creatures, by revealing their own beauty, reflect the Uncreated beauty of G.o.d in the precise degree which He has willed from all eternity, it cannot be said that they all realize the beauty of their Divine Exemplars according to His primary purpose and decree. Since there is physical and moral evil in the universe, since there are beings which fail to realize their ends, to attain to the perfection of their natures, it follows that these beings are not beautiful. In so far forth as they have real being, and the goodness or perfection which is identical with their reality, it may be admitted that all real beings are _fundamentally_ beautiful; for goodness or perfection is the foundation of beauty.(211) But in so far as they fail to realize the perfection due to their natures they lack even the foundation of beauty. Furthermore, in order that a thing which has the full perfection due to its nature be _formally_ beautiful, it must actually show forth by the clearness of its proportions and the harmony of its activities the fulness of its natural perfections.

But there is no need to prove that this is not universally verified in nature-or in art either. And hence we must infer that formal beauty is not a transcendental attribute of reality.(212)

Real beauty may be further divided into _material_ or _sensible_ or _physical_, and _intellectual_ or _spiritual_. The former reveals itself to hearing, seeing and imagination; the latter can be apprehended only by intellect; but intellect depends for all its objects on the data of the imagination. The beauty of spiritual realities is of course of a higher, n.o.bler and more excellent order than that of the realities of sense. The spiritual beauty which falls directly within human experience is that of the human spirit itself; from the soul and its experiences we can rise to an apprehension-a.n.a.logical and inadequate-of the Beauty of the Infinite Being. In the soul itself we can distinguish two sources of beauty: what we may call its _natural_ endowments such as intellect and will, and its _moral_ dispositions, its perfections and excellences as a free, intelligent, moral agent-its _virtues_. Beauty of soul, especially the moral beauty of the virtuous soul, is incomparably more precious than beauty of body. The latter, of course, like all real beauty in G.o.d's creation, has its proper dignity as an expression and revelation, however faint and inadequate, of the Uncreated Beauty of the Deity. But inasmuch as it is so inferior to the moral beauty proper to man, in itself so frail and evanescent, in its influence on human pa.s.sions so dangerous to virtue, we can understand why in the Proverbs of Solomon it is proclaimed to be vain and deceitful in contrast with the moral beauty of fearing the Lord: _Fallax gratia et vana est pulchritudo; mulier timens dominum ipsa laudabitur_.(213)

58. THE BEAUTIFUL IN ART. SCOPE AND FUNCTION OF THE FINE ARTS.-The expression of beauty is the aim of the fine arts. Art in general is ”the proper conception of a work to be accomplished”: ”ars nihil aliud est quam recta ratio aliquorum operum faciendorum”.(214) While the _mechanical_ arts aim at the production of things useful, the _fine_ arts aim at the production of things beautiful, _i.e._ of works which by their order, symmetry, harmony, splendour, etc., will give such apt expression to human ideals of natural beauty as to elicit esthetic enjoyment in the highest possible degree. The artist, then, must be a faithful student and admirer of all natural beauty; not indeed to aim at exact reproduction or imitation of the latter; but to draw therefrom his inspiration and ideals.

Even the most beautiful things of nature express only inadequately the ideal beauty which the human mind may gather from the study of them. This ideal is what the artist is ever struggling to express, with the ever-present and tormenting consciousness that the achievement of his highest effort will fall immeasurably short of giving adequate expression to it.

If each of the things of nature were so wholly simple and intelligible as to present the same ideal type of beauty to all, and leave no room for individual differences of interpretation, there would be no variety in the products of artistic genius, except indeed what would result from perfect or imperfect execution. But the things of nature are complex, and in part at least enigmatical; they present different aspects to different minds and suggest a variety of interpretations; they leave large scope to the play of the imagination both as to conception of the ideal itself and as to the arrangement and manipulation of the sensible materials in which the ideal is to find expression. By means of these two functions, _conception_ and _expression_, the genius of the artist seeks to interpret and realize for us ideal types of natural beauty.

The qualities of a work of art, the conditions it must fulfil, are those already enumerated in regard to beauty generally. It must have unity, order, proportion of parts; it must be true to nature, not in the sense of a mere copy, but in the sense of drawing its inspiration from nature, and so helping us to understand and appreciate the beauties of nature; it must display a power and clearness of expression adjusted to the capacity of the normal mind.

We may add-as indicating the connexion of art with morality-that the work of art must not be such as to excite disapproval or cause pain by shocking any normal faculty, or running counter to any fundamental belief, sympathy, sentiment or feeling, of the human mind. The contemplation of the really beautiful, whether in nature or in art, ought _per se_ to have an elevating, enn.o.bling, refining influence on the mind. But the beautiful is not the good; nor does the cultivation of the fine arts necessarily enrich the mind _morally_. From the ethical point of view art is one of those indifferent things which the will can make morally good or morally evil. Since man is a moral being, no human interest can fall outside the moral sphere, or claim independence of the moral law; and art is a human interest. Neither the creator, nor the critic, nor the student of a work of art can claim that the latter, simply because it is a work of art, is neither morally good nor morally bad; or that he in his special relation to it is independent of the moral law.

Under the specious plea that science in seeking truth is neither positively moral nor positively immoral, but abstracts altogether from the quality of morality, it is sometimes claimed that, _a pari_, art in its pursuit of the beautiful should be held to abstract from moral distinctions and have no concern for moral good or evil. But in the first place, though science as such seeks simply the true, and in this sense abstracts from the good and the evil, still the man of science both in acquiring and communicating truth is bound by the moral law: he may not, under the plea that he is learning or teaching truth, do anything _morally wrong_, anything that will _forfeit or endanger moral rect.i.tude_, whether in himself or in others. And in the second place, owing to the different relations of truth and beauty to moral goodness, we must deny the parity on which the argument rests. Truth appeals to the reason alone; beauty appeals to the senses, the heart, the will, the pa.s.sions and emotions: ”_Pulchrum trahit ad se desiderium_”. The scientist expresses truth in abstract laws, definitions and formulas: a law of chemistry will help the farmer to fertilize the soil, or the anarchist to a.s.sa.s.sinate sovereigns.

But the artist expresses beauty in concrete forms calculated to provoke emotions of esthetic enjoyment from the contemplation of them. Now there are other pleasure-giving emotions, sensual and carnal emotions, the indiscriminate excitement and unbridled indulgence of which the moral law condemns as evil; and if a work of art be of such a kind that it is directly calculated to excite them, the artist stands condemned by the moral law, and that even though his aim may have been to give expression to beauty and call forth esthetic enjoyment merely. If the preponderating influence of the artist's work on the normal human individual be a solicitation of the latter's nature towards what is evil, what is opposed to his real perfection, his moral progress, his last end, then that artist's work is not a work of art or truly beautiful. The net result of its appeal being evil and unhealthy, it cannot be itself a thing of beauty.

”Art for art's sake” is a cry that is now no longer novel. Taken literally it is unmeaning, for art is a means to an end-the expression of the beautiful; and a means as such cannot be ”for its own sake”. But it may signify that art should subserve no _extrinsic_ purpose, professional or utilitarian; that it should be disinterested; that the artist must aim at the conception and expression of the beautiful through a disinterested admiration and enthusiasm for the beautiful. In this sense the formula expresses a principle which is absolutely true, and which a.s.serts the n.o.ble mission of the artist to mankind. But the formula is also commonly understood to claim the emanc.i.p.ation of the artist from the bonds of morality, and his freedom to conceive and express beauty in whatever forms he pleases, whether these may aid men to virtue or solicit them to vice. This is the pernicious error to which we have just referred. And we may now add that this erroneous contention is not only ethically but also _artistically_ unsound.

For surely art ought to be based on truth: the artist should understand human nature, to which his work appeals: he should not regard as truly beautiful a work the contemplation of which will produce a _discord_ in the soul, which will _disturb the right order_ of the soul's activities, which will solicit the lower faculties to revolt against the higher; and this is what takes place when the artist ignores moral rect.i.tude in the pursuit of his art: by despising the former he is false to the latter. He fails to realize that the work of art must be judged not merely in relation to the total _amount_ of pleasure it may cause in those who contemplate it, but also in relation to the _quality_ of this pleasure; and not merely in relation to esthetic pleasure, but in relation to the total effect, the whole concrete influence of the work on all the mental faculties. He fails to see that if this total influence is evil, the work that causes it cannot be good nor therefore really beautiful.

Are we to conclude, then, that the artist is bound to aim positively and always at producing a _good moral effect_ through his work? By no means. Esthetic pleasure is, as we have said, indifferent. The pursuit of it, through the conception and expression of the beautiful, is the proper and intrinsic end of the fine arts, and is in itself legitimate so long as it does not run counter to the moral law. It has no need to run counter to the moral law, nor can it do so without defeating its own end. Outside its proper limits art ceases to be art; within its proper limits it has a n.o.ble and elevating mission; and it can serve indirectly but powerfully the interests of truth and goodness by helping men to subst.i.tute for the lower and grosser pleasures of sense the higher and purer esthetic pleasures which issue from the disinterested contemplation of the beautiful.

CHAPTER VIII. THE CATEGORIES OF BEING. SUBSTANCE AND ACCIDENT.

59. THE CONCEPTION OF ULTIMATE CATEGORIES.-Having examined so far the notion of real being itself, which is the proper subject-matter of ontology, and those widest or transcendental notions which are coextensive with that of reality, we must next inquire into the various modes in which we find real being expressed, determined, actualized, as it falls within our experience. In other words, we must examine the _highest categories of being_, the _suprema genera entis_. Considered from the point of view of the logical arrangement of our concepts, each of these categories reveals itself as a primary and immediate limitation of the extension of the transcendental concept of real being itself. Each is ultimately distinct from the others in the sense that no two of them can be brought under any other as a genus, nor can we discover any intermediate notion between any one of them and the notion of being itself. The latter notion is not properly a genus of which they would be species, nor can it be predicated univocally of any two or more of them (2). Each is itself an ultimate genus, a _genus supremum_.

By using these notions as predicates of our judgments we are enabled to interpret things, to obtain a genuine if inadequate insight into reality; for we a.s.sume as established in the _Theory of Knowledge_ that all our universal concepts have real and objective validity, that they give us real knowledge of the nature of those individual things which form the data of our sense experience. Hence the study of the categories, which is for Logic a cla.s.sification of our widest concepts, become for Metaphysics an inquiry into the modes which characterize real being.(215) By determining what these modes are, by studying their characteristics, by tracing them through the data of experience, we advance in our knowledge of reality.

The most divergent views have prevailed among philosophers both as to what a category is or signifies, and as to what or how many the really ultimate categories are. Is a category, such as substance, or quality, or quant.i.ty, a mode of real being revealed to the knowing mind, as most ancient and medieval philosophers thought, with Aristotle and St. Thomas? or is it a mental mode imposed on reality by the knowing mind, as many modern philosophers have thought, with Kant and after him? It is for the Theory of Knowledge to examine this alternative; nor shall we discuss it here except very incidentally: for we shall a.s.sume as true the broad affirmative answer to the first alternative. That is to say, we shall hold that the mind is able to see, in the categories generally, modes of reality; rejecting the sceptical conclusions of Kantism in regard to the power of the Speculative Reason, and the principles which lead to such conclusions.

As to the number and cla.s.sification of the ultimate categories, this is obviously a question which cannot be settled _a priori_ by any such purely deductive a.n.a.lysis of the concept of being as Hegel seems to have attempted; but only _a posteriori_, _i.e._ by an a.n.a.lysis of experience in its broadest sense as including Matter and Spirit, Nature and Mind, Object and Subject of Thought, and even the Process of Thought itself. Moreover it is not surprising that with the progress of philosophical reflection, certain categories should have been studied more deeply at certain epochs than ever previously, that they should have been ”discovered” so to speak, not of course in the sense that the human mind had not been previously in possession of them, but in the sense that because of closer study they furnished the mind with a richer and fuller power of ”explaining” things.

It is natural, too, that historians of philosophy, intent on tracing the movement of philosophic thought, should be inclined to over-emphasize the _relativity_ of the categories, as regards their ”explaining” value-their relativity to the general mentality of a certain epoch or period.(216) But there is danger here of confounding certain large _hypothetical conceptions_, which are found to yield valuable results at a certain stage in the progress of the sciences,(217) with the categories proper of real being. If the mind of man is of the same nature in all men, if it contemplates the same universe, if it is capable of reaching truth about this universe-real truth which is immutable,-then the modes of being which it apprehends in the universe, and by conceiving which it interprets the latter, must be in the universe as known, and must be there immutably.

Nowhere do we find this more clearly ill.u.s.trated than in the futility of the numerous attempts of modern philosophers to deny the reality of the category of _substance_, and to give an intelligible interpretation of experience without the aid of this category. We shall see that as a matter of fact it is impossible to deny _in thought_ the reality of substance, or to think at all without it, however philosophers may have denied it _in language_,-or thought that they denied it when they only rejected some erroneous or indefensible meaning of the term.

60. THE ARISTOTELIAN CATEGORIES.-The first palpable distinction we observe in the data of experience is that between _substance_ and _accident_. ”We might naturally ask,” writes Aristotle,(218) ”whether what is signified by such terms as _walking_, _sitting_, _feeling well_, is a being (or reality).... And we might be inclined to doubt it, for no single one of such acts _exists by itself_ (?a?? a?t? pef????), no one of them is separable from _substance_ (??s?a); it is rather to _him who_ walks, or sits, or feels well, that we give the name of _being_. That which is a being _in the primary meaning of this term_, a being _simply and absolutely_, and not merely a being _in a certain sense_, or with a qualification, is substance-?ste t? p??t?? ?? ?a? ?? t? ?? ???? ?? ?p??? ?

??s?a ?? e??.”(219) But manifestly, though substances, or what in ordinary language we call ”persons” and ”things”-men, animals, plants, minerals-are real beings in the fullest sense, nevertheless sitting, walking, thinking, willing, and actions generally, are also undoubtedly realities; so too are states and qualities; and shape, size, posture, etc. And yet we do not find any of these latter actually existing in themselves like substances, but only dependently on substances-on ”persons” or ”things” that think or walk or act, or are large or small, hot or cold, or have some shape or quality. They are all _accidents_, in contradistinction to substance.