ppiest marriage between the invisible and the visible.
It may be termed the joyfullest look of God. Blessed is he who can
watch and reflect this radiant look. The faculties of such a one
become fortified by creative influx. Through the exquisite shock of
the beautiful he reaps an accession of mental magnetism. Thus through
the beautiful we commune the most directly with the divine; and, other
things being equal, to the degree that men respond to, are thrilled
by, this vivacity of divine presence, as announced by the beautiful,
to that degree are they elevated in the scale of being.

Nature being minute and absolute in subdivision of function, the law
of severalty and independence--than which there is no law more
important and instructive--pervades creation. Thence the intellectual,
the religious, the true, the good, cannot interchange functions. A man
may be sincerely religious and do little for others, as is seen in
anchorites, and in many one-sided people, of Christian as well as of
Mahometan parentage, who are not anchorites. A man may be immensely
intellectual and not value truth. But neither a man's intellect, nor
his preference for truth, nor his benevolent nor his religious
sentiment, can yield its best fruit without the sunshine of the
beautiful. Sensibility to the beautiful--itself, like the others, an
independent inward power--stands to each one of them in a relation
different from that which they hold one to the other. The above and
other faculties _indirectly_ aid one the other, and to the complete
man their united action is needed; but feeling for the beautiful
_directly_ aids each one, aids by stimulating it, by expanding, by
purifying.

To the action of every other faculty this one gives vividness and
grace. It indues each with privilege of insight into the _soul_ of the
object which it is its special office to master. By help of
sensibility to the beautiful we have inklings of the essence of
things, we sympathize with the inward life that molds the outward
form. Hence men highly gifted with this sensibility become creative,
in whatever province of work they strive; and no man in any province
is truly creative except through the subtle energy imparted to him by
this sensibility, this competence to feel the invisible in the
visible.

The idea is the invisible; the embodiment thereof is the visible.
Hence the beautiful is always ideal; that is, it enfolds, embraces,
represents, with more or less success