the
spurious aestheticism and all the shortsighted utilitarianism which
have cast doubts upon the intimate and vital connection between beauty
and every other noble object of our living.

The three coincidences I have chosen are: that between development of
the aesthetic faculties and the development of the altruistic
instincts; that between development of a sense of aesthetic harmony and
a sense of the higher harmonies of universal life; and, before
everything else, the coincidence between the preference for aesthetic
pleasures and the nobler growth of the individual.

VI.

The particular emotion produced in us by such things as are beautiful,
works of art or of nature, recollections and thoughts as well as
sights and sounds, the emotion of aesthetic pleasure, has been
recognised ever since the beginning of time as of a mysteriously
ennobling quality. All philosophers have told us that; and the
religious instinct of all mankind has practically proclaimed it, by
employing for the worship of the highest powers, nay, by employing for
the mere designation of the godhead, beautiful sights, and sounds, and
words by which beautiful sights and sounds are suggested. Nay, there
has always lurked in men's minds, and expressed itself in the
metaphors of men's speech, an intuition that the Beautiful is in some
manner one of the primordial and, so to speak, cosmic powers of the
world. The theories of various schools of mental science, and the
practice of various schools of art, the practice particularly of the
persons styled by themselves aesthetes and by others decadents, have
indeed attempted to reduce man's relations with the great world-power
Beauty to mere intellectual dilettantism or sensual superfineness. But
the general intuition has not been shaken, the intuition which
recognised in Beauty a superhuman, and, in that sense, a truly divine
power. And now it must become evident that the methods of modern
psychology, of the great new science of body and soul, are beginning
to explain the reasonableness of this intuition, or, at all events, to
show very plainly in what direction we must look for the explanation
of it. This much can already be asserted, and can be indicated even
to those least versed in recent psychological study, to wit, that the
power of Beauty, the essential power therefore of art, is due to the
relations of certain visible and audible forms with the chief mental
and vital functions of all human beings;