me all degrees of
divergence from geometric precision, all degrees of variety, ranging
from the visual perfectness of the Parthenon to the sublime and
triumphant inconsequence of the sky-line of New York city. It may
manifest all degrees of complexity from a cup to a cathedral or from
"Home, Sweet Home" to Tschaikowski's "Pathetic Symphony."
Whatever the elements and the incidents, our sense of order in the
parts and of singleness of impression endows the object with its
form. The form as we apprehend it of an object constitutes its beauty,
its capability to arouse and to delight.

Because of the essential make-up of man's mind and spirit, powers
that are innate and determined by forces still beyond the scope of
analysis, the perception of a harmony of relations, which is beauty,
is attended with pleasure, a pleasure that is felt and cannot be
explained. This inborn, inexplicable delight is at once the origin of
the arts of form and the basis of our appreciation. Each art, as the
fashioning of objects of use, as decoration, architecture, and music,
is governed by its own intrinsic, inherent laws and rests its appeal
upon man's pleasure in form. There is no standard external to the
laws of the art itself by which to judge the rightness and the beauty
of the individual work. In the arts of use and in decoration and
architecture, the beauty of a work, as the beauty of a chair, as in the
ordering and appointments of a room, as the beauty of a temple, a
theatre, a dwelling, derives primarily from the fitness of the object to
its function, and finally from the rhythm of its lines and the harmony
of its masses and proportions,--its total form. A chair which cannot
be sat in may be interesting and agreeable to look at, but it is not
truly beautiful; for then it is not a chair but a curiosity, a bijou, and a
superfluity; to be beautiful it must be first of all frankly and
practically a chair. A living-room which cannot be lived in with
comfort and restfulness and peace of mind is not a living-room, but
a museum or a concentrated department store; at best it is only an
inclosed space. A beautiful building declares its function and use,
satisfies us with the logic and coherence of its parts, and delights us
with its reticence or its boldness, its simplicity or its inventiveness,
in fine, its personality, as expressed in its parts and their confluence
into an ordered, self-contained, and self-sufficing whole. Music,
using sound fo