664. ON THE RELATION OF NATURAL SCIENCE TO ART. 
in his “* History of sthetics in Germany,” * gives a wearying and dis- 
couraging account of such fruitless efforts. Philosophers of all schools 
have revelled in absract definitions of the essence of beauty. They 
eall it unity in multiplicity, or fitness without a purpose, or uncon- 
scious rationality, or the transcendant realized, or the enjoyment of the 
harmony of the absolute, and so forth. But all these properties, which 
are supposed to constitute the beautiful, have no more to do with our 
actual sensation of it than the vibrations of light and sound with the 
qualities they bring to our perception. Indeed, it would be vain to 
attempt to find one term equally fitted to describe all the varieties of 
the beautiful; the beauty of cosmos as contrasted with chaos, of a 
mountain prospect, a symphony, or a poem, of Ristori in Medea, or a 
rose; or even, taking the fine arts alone, the beauty of the Cologne 
Cathedral, the “Hermes” of Praxiteles, the Madonna Sistina, a picture 
of still-life, a landscape, a genre piece, or a Japanese flower design; 
not to mention the questionable custom which permits us in German to 
speak of a beautiful taste ora beautiful smell. Let us rather admit that 
here, as so often, we meet with something inexplicable in our organi- 
zation; something inexpressible, though not the less distinetly felt, 
without which life would offer a dull and cheerless aspect. 
In an essay of Schiller’s there is a disquisition on physical beauty. t 
He distinguishes between an architectural beauty and a beauty which 
emanates from grace. I attacked this wsthetic rationalism, to which 
the last century was strongly addicted, twenty years ago on a similar 
occasion in a lecture on Leibnitz’s ideas in modern science. I ventured 
to assert that “the attraction which physical beauty exerts on the op- 
posite sexes can as little be explained as the effects of amelody.”t On 
reflection, it seems indeed incomprehensible why one distinct shape, 
which, according to Fechner, might be represented by a plain algebraic 
equation between three variables, should please us beyond a thousand 
other possibilities. The reason can be traced from no abstract principle, 
no rules of architecture, not even from Hogarth’s line of beauty. A 
year after this remark was made, Charles Darwin published his ‘ De- 
seent of man,” in which the principle of sexual selection, only cursorily 
treated in the “ Origin of Species,” is fully expounded, and pursued in 
all its bearings. I remember vividly how, in a discussion with Dove as 
to the necessity of admitting a vital force, he embarrassed me by the 
objection that in the organic world luxury occurs, for example, in the 
plumage of a peacock or a bird of Paradise; while in inorganic¢ nature 
Maupertuis’s law of the minimum of action precludes such prodigality. 
Here was a solution of the problem, allowing that one might attribute 
to animals a certain sense of beauty. The gorgeous nuptial plumage dis- 
played by male birds may have been acquired through the preference of 
*Munich, 1868. 
t** Veber Anmuth und Wiirde.” 
{The author's “ Collected Addresses, etc,” vol. 1, pp. 49, 50, Leipzig, 1886. 
