nd forms, so as to ascertain their
relative quantities or collocation; and these facts (of which we shall
hereafter have occasion to speak) may be of importance both in Art and
Science. Still, when thus obtained, they will be no more than mere
facts, on which we can predicate nothing but that, when they are
imitated,--that is, when similar combinations of quantities, &c., are
repeated in a work of art,--they will produce the same effect. But
_why_ they should is a mystery which the reflective faculties do
not solve; and never can, because it refers to a living Power that is
above the understanding. In the human figure, for instance, we can
give no reason why eight heads to the stature please us better than
six, or why three or twelve heads seem to us monstrous. If we say, in
the latter case, _because_ the head of the one is too small and
of the other too large, we give no _reason_; we only state the
_fact_ of their disagreeable effect on us. And, if we make the
proportion of eight heads our rule, it is because of the fact of its
being more pleasing to us than any other; and, from the same feeling,
we prefer those statures which approach it the nearest. Suppose we
analyze a certain combination of sounds and colors, so as to ascertain
the exact relative quantities of the one and the collocation of the
other, and then compare them. What possible resemblance can the
understanding perceive between these sounds and colors? And yet a
something within us responds to both in a similar emotion. And so with
a thousand things, nay, with myriads of objects that have no other
affinity but with that mysterious harmony which began with our being,
which slept with our infancy, and which their presence only seems to
have _awakened_. If we cannot go back to our own childhood, we
may see its illustration in those about us who are now emerging into
that unsophisticated state. Look at them in the fields, among the
birds and flowers; their happy faces speak the harmony within them:
the divine instrument, which these have touched, gives them a joy
which, perhaps, only childhood in its first fresh consciousness can
know. Yet what do they understand of musical quantities, or of the
theory of colors?

And so with respect to Truth and Goodness; whose preexisting Ideas,
being in the living constituents of an immortal spirit, need but the
slightest breath of some outward condition of the true and good,--a
simple problem, or a kind act,--to awake th