ression:

That the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a
flow, or a current, or an attempt, from negativeness to positiveness,
and is intermediate to both.

By positiveness we mean:

Harmony, equilibrium, order, regularity, stability, consistency, unity,
realness, system, government, organization, liberty, independence, soul,
self, personality, entity, individuality, truth, beauty, justice,
perfection, definiteness--

That all that is called development, progress, or evolution is movement
toward, or attempt toward, this state for which, or for aspects of
which, there are so many names, all of which are summed up in the one
word "positiveness."

At first this summing up may not be very readily acceptable. At first it
may seem that all these words are not synonyms: that "harmony" may mean
"order," but that by "independence," for instance, we do not mean
"truth," or that by "stability" we do not mean "beauty," or "system," or
"justice."

I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, which expresses itself in
astronomic phenomena, and chemic, biologic, psychic, sociologic: that it
is everywhere striving to localize positiveness: that to this attempt in
various fields of phenomena--which are only quasi-different--we give
different names. We speak of the "system" of the planets, and not of
their "government": but in considering a store, for instance, and its
management, we see that the words are interchangeable. It used to be
customary to speak of chemic equilibrium, but not of social equilibrium:
that false demarcation has been broken down. We shall see that by all
these words we mean the same state. As every-day conveniences, or in
terms of common illusions, of course, they are not synonyms. To a child
an earth worm is not an animal. It is to the biologist.

By "beauty," I mean that which seems complete.

Obversely, that the incomplete, or the mutilated, is the ugly.

Venus de Milo.

To a child she is ugly.

When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though,
by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

A hand thought of only as a hand, may seem beautiful.

Found on a battlefield--obviously a part--not beautiful.

But everything in our experience is only a part of something else that
in turn is only a part of still something else--or that there is nothing
beautiful in our experience: only appearances that are intermediate to
beauty and ugliness--that only u