it would be impossible for us to project
a theoretical universe made up of "cosmic streams of tendency,"
whether "spiritual" or "material," in complete disregard of the
soul's primordial aesthetic sense.

The logical scrupulosity and rationalistic passion which drive a
cosmic philosopher forward, in his attempt to construct a universe
in disregard of the human conscience and the human aesthetic
sense, are themselves evidence that while he has suppressed in
himself the first two of the three primordial ideas of which we
speak, he has become an all-or-nothing slave of the last of these
three ideas--namely, the idea of truth. He has sacrificed his
conscience and his taste to this isolated and abstracted "truth," the
quest of pure reason alone, and, as a result of this fanaticism, the
real "true truth," that is to say the complete rhythmic vision of the
totality of man's nature, has been suppressed and destroyed.

It must be fully admitted at this point that the fanaticism of the
so-called "pure saint" and the so-called "pure artist" who suppress,
the one for the sake of "goodness" and the other for the sake of
"beauty," the third great primordial idea which we have called
"truth," is a fanaticism just as one sided and just as destructive of
the complete harmonious vision as those other kinds.

That this is the case can easily be proved by recalling how thin,
how strained, how morbid, how ungracious, how inhuman, those
so-called "saints" and "artists" become, when, in their neglect of
reason and truth, they persist in following their capricious,
subjective, fantastic, individual dreams, out of all concrete relation
to the actual world we live in.

We arrive, therefore, at a point from which we are able to detect
the true inner spirit of the nature of art; and what we discover may
thus be stated. Art is the expression, through the medium of an
individual temperament, of a beauty which is one of the primordial
aspects of this pluralistic world. The eternal duality of things
implies that this beauty is always manifested as something in
perpetual conflict with its opposite, namely with that antagonistic
aspect of the universe which we name the hideous or the ugly.

This duality exists as the eternal condition of each one of the three
primordial ideas out of which the universe is evoked. Each of
these three ideas is only known to us as the result of a relative
victory over its opposite. Beauty is known to us as a relative