f tradition--the world of science.

Higher vision--revealed light--supernatural world.

Such are the conditions necessary for the understanding of my
demonstrations.

Having prepared your eye for the vision of these three worlds which
serve as the bases of art, I shall, then, reveal to you their splendors;
happy if, thus, I can help to make you bless the author of so many
marvels, and communicate to you those keen joys which perpetuate in the
soul a fountain of youth which can never be quenched by the infirmities
of the body.

The Beautiful

Beauty is that reason itself which presides at the creation of things.
It is the invincible power which attracts and subjugates us in it. The
Beautiful admits of three characters, which we distinguish under the
titles of _ideal_ beauty, _moral_ beauty, _plastic_ beauty.

Plato defined ideal beauty when he said: "Beauty is the splendor of
truth." St. Augustine said of moral beauty that it is the splendor of
goodness. I define plastic beauty as the plastic manifestation of truth
and goodness.

In so far as it responds to the particular type in accordance with which
it is formed, every creature bears the crown of beauty; because in its
correspondence with its type it manifests, according to its capacity,
the Divine Being who created it.

The Beautiful is an absolute principle; it is the essence of beings, the
life of their functions. Beauty is a consequence, an effect, a form of
the Beautiful. It results from the attractions of the form. The
attraction of the form comes from the nobility of the function. This is
why all functions not being equally noble, all do not admit of beauty.
The characteristic of beauty is to be amiable; consequently a thing is
ugly only in view of the amiable things which we seek in beauty.

Beauty is to the Beautiful what the individual reason is to the Divine
reason of things. Human reason is but one ray of a vast orb called the
reason of things,--Divine reason. Let us say of beauty what we have said
of the individual reason, and we shall understand how the Beautiful is
to be distintinguished from it. Beauty is one ray of the Beautiful.

Beauty is the expression of the object for which the thing is.

It is the stamp of its functions. It is the transparency of the
aptitudes of the agent and the radiance of the faculties which it
governs. It is the order which results from the dynamic disposition of
forms operated in view of the function.