on art, and upon the art of
architecture in particular.

One of the things which theosophy teaches is that those transcendent
glimpses of a divine order and harmony throughout the universe
vouchsafed the poet and the mystic in their moments of vision are not
the paradoxes--the paronomasia as it were--of an intoxicated state of
consciousness, but glimpses of reality. We are all of us participators
in a world of concrete music, geometry and number--a world of
sounds, odors, forms, motions, colors, so mathematically related and
coordinated that our pigmy bodies, equally with the farthest star,
vibrate to the music of the spheres. There is a _Beautiful Necessity_
which rules the world, which is a law of nature and equally a law of
art, for art is idealized creation: nature carried to a higher power
by reason of its passage through a human consciousness. Thought and
emotion tend to crystallize into forms of beauty as inevitably as does
the frost on a window pane. Art therefore in one of its aspects is the
weaving of a pattern, the communication of an order and a method to
the material or medium employed. Although no masterpiece was ever
created by the conscious following to set rules, for the true artist
works unconsciously, instinctively, as the bird sings or as the bee
builds its honey-cell, yet an analysis of any masterpiece reveals the
fact that its author (like the bird and the bee) has "followed the
rules without knowing them."

Helmholtz says, "No doubt is now entertained that beauty is subject
to laws and rules dependent on the nature of human intelligence. The
difficulty consists in the fact that these laws and rules, on whose
fulfilment beauty depends, are not consciously present in the mind of
the artist who creates the work, or of the observer who contemplates
it." Nevertheless they are discoverable, and can be formulated,
after a fashion. We have only to read aright the lessons everywhere
portrayed in the vast picture-books of nature and of art.

The first truth therein published is the law of _Unity_--oneness; for
there is one Self, one Life, which, myriad in manifestation, is yet
in essence ever _one_. Atom and universe, man and the world--each is
a unit, an organic and coherent whole. The application of this law to
art is so obvious as to be almost unnecessary of elucidation, for to
say that a work of art must possess unity, must seem to proceed from a
single impulse and be the embodiment of one dominant i