g into new
relations with its environment may be raised to even higher rank
in the aesthetic scale of values. In brief, true progress becomes
possible for the whole universe. Herbert Spencer stopped short
at progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. It is
more interesting, not to say, inspiring, to postulate increase of
capacity for sharing in reason and form. The vast process of
evolution may then be viewed as an upward sweep into fuller
beauty and into correspondingly fuller life.

Of the fact that there is such an upward process, there is
abundant and accumulating evidence. The struggle upwards of
organic life, culminating so far, in man as we know him--the
increasingly complex beauty of natural forms--the haste of
nature to conceal her scars--all alike speak of a striving upward.
Nay, we are being told that the atoms themselves, so long
regarded as ultimates, have been subjected to the evolutionary
stress and strain, and have advanced from the simplest forms to
higher and more complex symmetries. And in another field, the
arts, more particularly painting and the drama, almost demand
the recognition of some such principle of progress; for they are
constantly and necessarily using elements which in themselves
are accounted ugly, for the production of their supremest
beauties.

The use of discords in music is singularly suggestive in this
regard. There are combinations of musical sounds which, when
produced as isolated combinations, are harsh, and even painful.
But let them be heralded by other chords, and let them be parted
from by suitable resolutions, and they can charm, or thrill, or
kindle deep emotion. What does this fact imply? That discords
in music, when used with knowledge and mastery, do not take
their places as aliens in musical progressions--as insertions of
ugliness in a texture of surrounding beauty--_but as themselves
beautiful_. Their aesthetic value is gained by their being linked
up in a network of relations which makes them part and parcel
of that which is an ordered and rational whole. In short, discords
are potential beauties; they have capacity for form and reason.

The ugly, then, is not to be opposed to the beautiful as its
contrary, but as standing in the relation to it of the less to the
more perfect. There will thus be grades of beauty as there are
grades of reality. And mystic intuition will have corresponding
grades of dignity and insight. The grand process of evolution is