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all her forms—it may be ugly as well as beautiful—but more espe- 
cially with what is beautiful and perfect in nature, as that for which 
the mind was originally made or adapted. 
1. Art, though having to do with the perceptive faculties and the 
senses, is spiritual in its essence and has its foundation in an inner 
susceptibility of the soul, which corresponds to outward forms. 
There is a power in the mind of receiving impressions correspond- 
ing to the power that impresses. ‘There is more than this. The 
mind contains the very ideas, in their conceptual mold, in which 
the forms of natural objects are cast, and is fitted to comprehend 
them, so that art is the condition under which the sensibility for 
impression is excited when the object and subject become identified. 
The German philosopher, Lotze, indeed says that ‘‘ the impression 
of beauty cannot be referred to a uniform standard in us, to a 
spiritual organization actually existing in all individuals, but to one 
that has first to be realized in each person by means of develop- 
ment, and realized in each only in an imperfect and one-sided 
way;’’ but, though this opinion of Lotze’s may be true, that the 
perfect standard is not realized in every mind, or in the artist him- 
self, yet for it to be realized at all, there must be the organization, 
the susceptibility in every mind as mind, and the imperfection of 
its development does not militate against the truth that there is an 
ideal condition, like the plate delicately prepared to receive im- 
pressions of objects, and without which the actualization of any 
form of beauty would be lost and objects would remain without 
form and void. A mountain is a pile of rocky matter of a certain 
geologic period, as science teaches, until thoughts of majesty, unity, 
power, are developed in its impingement on the ideal sense. The 
beauty of nature is only to him who appreciates it; but we are all 
of us inframed_in this natural kosmos as an organism itself designed 
to be that through which the soul realizes its ideas, and without 
which the mind could not formulate them, and this is the most 
important part nature plays in art. In like manner the ethical 
sense is a permanent condition of the soul, but the ideas of justice, 
right, duty, are not developed except in the actual relations of our 
natural life. 
Call the beautiful an intuition or not, man, I contend, has an 
esthetic sense, the outcome of whose formulated ideas is art, and 
which is capable of recognizing and expressing the objective view 
and beauty of the universe. We are subjects of impressions which 
