BEAUTY

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 7 August 1926, Page 11

BEAUTY

ROUGH-HANDLED BY PHILOSOPHY.

rpOWAEDS the end of the nineteenth century aesthetes sought to bring about tile worship of the beautiful, but they succeeded in doing little more than make themselves look ridiculous. They surrounded themselves with brae-a-brac, old china, dadoes, old gold curtains, sunflowers, peacock feathers, etc. Still, they had a certain influence in removing the austerity of the age. Plato was one of the earliest to define beauty, which he never wholly, separated from that which was good, while Aristotle said that the beautiful was that which wsff neither too small or too targe, but a mean between extremes. Hegel said that the beautiful was the absolute ideal realising itself; beauty, therefore, was immaterial, rare, tarnished frequently with the intrusion of the concrete. The highest finite realisation of it was in art, for that was the finite realisation of an abstract ideal. Other philosophers said that beauty was anything that gave pleasure to the senses. Edmund Burke, who in his essay on “The Sublime and the Beautiful/' said that every object excited identical pleasures and pains in all mankind, though he qualified that by saying that the judgment was concerned with dif-

forences of taste, and that a difference iu taste proceeded from a difference in respect of critical knowledge. Burke treated beauty as a physiological matter, and many modern physiological psvchologists base their theories on his "dogma. Beauty, ho said, acted by relaxing the whole system. “The easy gradations of line, and the soft tones of colour, which are proper to beautv, affect the sense by lulling it to repose.’’ Burke vigorously opposed the idea that that which was useful must of necessity be beautiful—-a‘view expounded in some art schools to-day. The wedgelike snout of the swine, with its little sunk eyes, so well adapted for digging and rooting, would be extremely” beautiful. There are few animals whose parts are better contrived, or who seem less beautiful, than a monkey. The stomach and the liver are incomparably well adapted for their purpose, vet they are not beautiful. Ho summed up "beauty as that quality, or those qualities, in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion analogous to it, and ho separated love from, desire, which was an energy of the mind that hurried ns on to the possession of certain objects.