faculties of perception, the
object would remain eternally unperceived. The sense, therefore,
that the whole world is made to be food for the soul; that beauty is
not only its own, but all things' excuse for being; that universal
aspiration towards perfection is the key and secret of the world, --
that sense is the poetical reverberation of a psychological fact -- of
the fact that our mind is an organism tending to unity, to
unconsciousness of what is refractory to its action, and to
assimilation and sympathetic transformation of what is kept within
its sphere. The idea that nature could be governed by an aspiration
towards beauty is, therefore, to be rejected as a confusion, but at
the same time we must confess that this confusion is founded on a
consciousness of the subjective relation between the perceptibility,
rationality, and beauty of things.

_Utility the principle of organization in the arts._

Sec. 40. This subjective relation is, however, exceedingly loose. Most
things that are perceivable are not perceived so distinctly as to be
intelligible, nor so delightfully as to be beautiful. If our eye had
infinite penetration, or our imagination infinite elasticity, this
would not be the case; to see would then be to understand and to
enjoy. As it is, the degree of determination needed for perception is
much less than that needed for comprehension or ideality. Hence
there is room for hypothesis and for art. As hypothesis organizes
experiences imaginatively in ways in which observation has not
been able to do, so art organizes objects in ways to which nature,
perhaps, has never condescended.

The chief thing which the imitative arts add to nature is
permanence, the lack of which is the saddest defect of many
natural beauties. The forces which determine natural forms,
therefore, determine also the forms of the imitative arts. But the
non-imitative arts supply organisms different in kind from those
which nature affords. If we seek the principle by which these
objects are organized, we shall generally find that it is likewise
utility. Architecture, for instance, has all its forms suggested by
practical demands. Use requires our buildings to assume certain
determinate forms; the mechanical properties of our materials, the
exigency of shelter, light, accessibility, economy, and convenience,
dictate the arrangements of our buildings.

Houses and temples have an evolution like that of animals and
plants. Various forms