ON THE BEAUTY OF NATURE. 2.09 
of giving the best answer that any such question admits of, 
being one of the most eminent philosophical writers of the 
age, and not a mere inventor of phrases intended to pass for 
philosophy with half-educated people who pronounce them 
‘«oreater than Newton,’’and their periodicals print such rubbish 
for them. Probably they could not answer a single question 
out of Newton in an examination. The answer I got was 
this: that beauty is merely a question of habit and fashion, 
and that there is no such thing as absolute beauty, and there- 
fore nature has done nothing for it. ‘That is only another 
specimen of the common fallacy of that school in these matters, 
of generalising from a very small or special set of instances, 
which is directly contrary to the great law of scientific induc- 
tion. We can afford to admit that our ideas of artificial 
beauty, such as we try to make for ourselves, are very much 
matters of transitory fashion, though even that requires some 
qualification. I need only utter the word “ dress,” to bring to 
your minds the very idea of mutability rather than of beauty ; 
and you will need no reminder that we are considering the 
beauty of nature, and that dress is not natural. Nor is any 
artificial adornment of the person, or the cultivation of any 
particular kind of figure, in which one nation, or the people of 
one age, may admire just the contrary of another, and call that 
a beauty which some other nation pronounces a monstrosity. 
But, setting aside mere dress as an ornament, in which 
change (with some regard to use and convenience) has long 
been regarded more than abstract beauty in all the modern 
nations, I do not think it is true that the taste of civilised 
nations about the cultivation of what is comprehensively called 
figure has materially varied in any known period, and still less 
about beauty of face, which admits less of artificial cultivation. 
We need not consider purely barbarian tastes, which some- 
times extend to absolute mutilation, as of Chinese ladies’ feet, 
and the production of hideous deformities of face and figure 
by still more barbarous and unprogressive nations. 
Most young men and women now would accept it as the 
highest compliment to be told that they resemble some famous 
Greek or Roman bust in face, and even in their hair, of which 
the style for women is necessarily, in some ‘degree, artificial, 
and therefore variable. If some of the old Roman _hair- 
dressing is not copied by modern ladies and their “artists ” 
in that line, it is certainly not because it is not beautiful, but 
either from ignorance how to do it, or from the vile modern 
habit of allowing French fetaire to invent their fashions, 
and perhaps from a bold desire of advanced female thinkers 
to display their contempt for St. Paul’s and other antiquated 
