of any aesthetic
experience--poetry, music, painting and the rest--is beautiful
through its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses,
primarily of sight and hearing, and through the harmony of the
suggestions and impulses it arouses with the whole organism." Beauty,
then, according to the psychologists, is the quality inherent in
things, the possession of which enables them to stimulate our
organism to harmonious functioning. And the perception of beauty
is a purely physiological reaction.

This explanation, valid within its limits, seems to me to fall short of
the whole truth. For it fails to reckon with that faculty and that entity
within us whose existence we know but cannot explain,--the faculty
we call mind, which operates as imagination, and the entity we
recognize as spirit or soul. I mean the faculty which gives us the
idea of God and the consciousness of self, the faculty which
apprehends relations and significance in material transcending their
material embodiment. I mean the entity within us which expresses
itself in love and aspiration and worship, the entity which is able to
fuse with the harmony external to it in a larger unity. When I glance
out upon a winter twilight drenching earth and sky with luminous
blue, a sudden delight floods in upon me, gathering up all my senses
in a surging billow of emotion, and my being pulses and vibrates in
a beat of joy. Something within me goes out to meet the landscape;
so far as I am at all conscious of the moment, I feel, There, that is
what I am! This deep harmony of tone and mass is the expression of
a fuller self toward which I yearn. My being thrills and dilates with
the sensation of larger life. Then, after the joy has throbbed itself out
and my reaction takes shape as consciousness, I set myself to
consider the sources and the processes of my experience. I note that
my eye has perceived color and form. My intellect, as I summon it
into action, tells me that I am looking upon a scene in nature
composed of material elements, as land and trees and water and
atmosphere. My senses, operating through channels of matter,
receive, and my brain registers, impressions of material objects. But
this analysis, though defining the processes, does not quite explain
_my joy._ I know that beyond all this, transcending my material
sense-perception and transcending the actual material of the
landscape, there is something in me and there is something in nature
which meet