194 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



III 



It will aid us in further clearing up the concep- 

 tion of beauty and art as ends in themselves, if we 

 now trace to a sufficient precision the nature of the 

 distinction between these three consubstantial Ideas 

 that have their fruition in this hypostatic union. 



In attempting to do this, we naturally have our 

 attention arrested by a time-honoured and very 

 striking definition of beauty : Beauty is the reduc- 

 tion of diversity to unity ; it is variety in unity, or 

 unity in variety ; it is the harmony of divergent 

 parts in a single whole ; it is the reconciliation of 

 antagonistic elements ; it is the triumph of the one 

 over the many. The definition has not only the 

 note of age, but of genius : it is itself beautiful ; 

 we feel that it is fit to have come, as it did, from 

 the lips of Plato and of Augustine. Moreover, it 

 is undeniably true, in the sense that it states a real 

 and universal quality of beauty, and an indispen- 

 sable condition of its existence. It is certain that 

 everything beautiful must be self-harmonious ° that 

 every work of art must have an inward fitness of its 

 component members. But while this is true of art, 

 and of beauty as its principle, the crucial question 

 is whether it is peculiar to art and beauty ; or, to 

 state the case otherwise, granting that it is an in- 



