comes within the
senses that satisfies me so much,--how will it be with the
substantially, originally, primitively beautiful? How will it be with my
soul, the divine intellect, and the law of nature? It is right, then,
that the contemplation of this vestige of light lead me, through the
purification of my soul, to the imitation, and to conformity and
participation in that which is more worthy and higher, into which I am
transformed and unto which I unite myself: for I am certain that
nature, which has placed this beauty before my eyes and has gifted me
with an interior sense, through which I am able to infer a deeper and
incomparably greater beauty, wills that I be promoted to the altitude
and eminence of more excellent kinds. Nor do I believe that my true
divinity, as she shows herself to me in symbols and vestiges, will scorn
me if in symbols and vestiges I honour her and sacrifice to her; as my
heart and affections are always so ordered as to look higher. For who
may he be, that can honour in essence and real substance, if in such
manner he cannot understand it?

It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or
unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being. For is not a Symbol
ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer
revelation, of the Godlike?--("Sartor Resartus.")

CES. Right well do you demonstrate how, to men of heroic spirit, all
things turn to good and how they are able to turn captivity into greater
liberty, and the being vanquished into an occasion for greater victory.
Well dost thou know that the love of corporeal beauty to those who are
well disposed, not only does not keep them back from higher enterprises,
but rather does it lend wings to arrive at these, when the necessity for
love is converted into a study of the virtuous, through which the lover
is forced into those conditions in which he is worthy of the thing loved
and perchance of even a still higher, better and more beautiful thing;
so that he comes to be either contented to have gained that which he
desires, or so satisfied with its own beauty, that he can despise that
of others, which comes to be, by him, vanquished and overcome, so that
he either remains tranquil, or else he aspires to things more excellent
and grand. And so will the heroic spirit ever go on trying until it
becomes raised to the desire of divine beauty itself, without
similitude, figure, symbol, or kind, if it be possible, and what is m