114 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 



physical science may and probably will, some day, 

 enable our posterity to set forth the exact physical 

 concomitants and conditions of the strange rapture 

 of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture 

 will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond 

 the physical world ; and, even in the mental world, 

 something- superadded to mere sensation. I do 

 not wish to crow unduly over my humble cousin 

 the orang, but in the aesthetic province, as in 

 that of the intellect, I am afraid he is nowhere. 

 I doubt not he would detect a fruit amidst a wilder- 

 ness of leaves where I could see nothing ; but I 

 am tolerably confident that he has never been 

 awestruck, as I have been, by the dim religious 

 gloom, as of a temple devoted to the earthgods, 

 of the tropical forests which he inhabits. Yet 

 I doubt not that our poor long-armed and short- 

 legged friend, as he sits meditatively munching 

 his durian fruit, has something behind that sad 

 Socratic face of his which is utterly ' ' beyond the 

 bounds of physical science." Physical science may 

 know all about his clutching the fruit and munching 

 it and digesting it, and how the physical titillation 

 of his palate is transmitted to some microscopic 

 cells of the gray matter of his brain. But the 

 feelings of sweetness and of satisfaction which, 

 for a moment, hang out their signal lights in his 

 melancholy eyes, are as utterly outside the bounds 

 of physics as is the "fine frenzy" of a human 

 rhapsodist. 



When I was a mere boy, with a perverse 

 tendency to think when I ought to have been 

 playing, my mind was greatly exercised by this 

 formidable problem, What would become of things 

 if they lost their qualities ? As the qualities had 



