in] The Triunity of Personality 99 



mediates the relation between the other (stick) and the 

 self (me) with the (again limited) creative function of 

 conation. In the emotion associated with it lies what 

 freedom of response there may be : of choice of the form 

 which the creative function shall take. When the emo- 

 tion is less intermingled with mere sensation, its un- 

 causedness is still more obvious. The emotion associated 

 with beauty links my perception of external things, 

 which is now in part the intellectual recognition of 

 order, to my creative sense that I can cause order. The 

 perception of beauty is markedly creative. It is the 

 harmonising of my experience of outside phenomena 

 with my knowledge of myself as a free cause of outside 

 phenomena. The sense of beauty is the realisation of 

 the possible harmoniousness of all experience, making 

 me will to make experience truly harmonious. Beauty 

 produces a yearning, that is creative in essence, for 

 higher things 1 . My emotion directs my creative imagi- 

 nation towards the ideal of harmony. 



The full emotion of love, which is the common 

 multiple of all partial emotions, is itself perfect freedom, 

 making cognition one with conation, in a perfect unity 

 of harmonious experience, whose harmony is called into 



1 The yearning which is the most characteristic feature asso- 

 ciated with the recognition of Beauty in an object is singularly 

 suggestive. When I see that a thing is beautiful I seem to under- 

 stand it, get inside it, feel that it has a message for me a message 

 of its relationship. And the result is a voiceless cry "I want I 

 I want I " Now this yearning is far less prominent in the sense of 

 reciprocal love, and yet there is a close resemblance between the 

 emotion of beauty and love. There is far more sense of satisfac- 

 tion, of rest, here. It may plausibly be argued, on these grounds, 

 that Beauty is really a felt-relationship, and that the dissatisfied 

 yearning is the expression of the fact that perfect relationship is 

 reciprocal. This is not the place to develope a theory of aesthetic, 

 but I cannot help feeling that in this problem of relationship a 

 clue to the meaning and nature of Beauty may be found. 



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