THE MEANING OF THE ESTHETIC IMPULSE. 



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perform the aesthetic act, and the expression itself is Beauty. 

 We may gain our contact with Reality through nature itself, 

 or through another more penetrating mind that has perpetuated 

 its vision through the technical medium of words, music or 

 picture. Whichever way our intuition comes, it means a gift, 

 for which we can give no return. Because it means this, we 

 are dissatisfied, and our dissatisfaction endeavours to remedy 

 itself by giving a gift to the world. In some way, small or great, 

 we create. But we never achieve the same sense of rest and 

 satisfaction that love gives us — the love that is equal between 

 the friends. A pain like that of unreturned love remains. 



Now let us approach our problem of the meaning of the 

 aesthetic impulse from another angle. 



God is Love. If there be a God at all (and in a brief lecture 

 like this one cannot stop to discuss the many arguments, even 

 purely intellectual ones, that make it probable), He must be Love. 

 Nothing else will serve to explain the gradual emergence of 

 love as the prime quality of personal being. If God be Love, 

 He must know Himself as Love — that is, as a relation between 

 Persons. This is one of the fundamentals that the doctrine 

 of the Trinity is trying to express. If, then, we can imagine 

 a God like that : a God before creation ; a God whose love is 

 satisfied for ever in this mutual internal relation — and I do 

 not think we can, for a reason I will try to explain immediately — 

 He would know all Reality in knowing Himself as the perfect 

 relation of Love. He would be the Absolute — and He would 

 contradict his own Nature as Love. 



A Love that was content with its own perfect self-experience 

 would have self as its object : Love would be simply selfishness 

 raised to its highest power. I do not think you can escape 

 this conclusion by emphasizing the doctrine of the Trinity as 

 desiderating Three Persons, unless you deny the One God. 

 Tritheism might get over the difiiculty ; Monotheism, even 

 Trinitarian Monotheism cannot. If this be so, we are left with 

 only one alternative — that God must eternally be Creative. 

 The Perfect Experience, such as God's must be, can only be love 

 if it be shared ; for this sharing, with its implication of self- 

 abnegation in giving the necessary opportunity of winning 

 freedom to the creatures it calls into being, gives just the self- 

 surrender that is essential to Love. I do not know that we 

 can get much further than this, nor am 1 certain that it is capable 

 of statement in the terms of a purely intellectual metaphysic. 



Q 2 



