Author: Charles Hartshorne
[p. 212]
As if the efforts of human beings in behalf of justice, or knowledge or beauty, depended . . . upon assurance that there already existed . . . some supernal region . . . where criminals are humanely treated, where there is no serfdom or slavery, where all facts and truths are already discovered and possessed, and all beauty displayed in actualized form.
John Dewey, in A Common Faith
The most generally recognized principle of beauty, in art and in nature, is the principle of organic unity, or unity in variety. We say that variety is the spice of life, but we know equally well that spice by itself is not a satisfying diet. There must be a balance of likeness and difference, of similarity and contrast, if there is to be beauty. Too little likeness between the parts of a work of art results in confusion, discord, chaos. Too little difference results in monotony. The great objective of art is to avoid both the evil of chaos and the evil of monotony. Suppose a state of pure unity without variety or difference of any kind. Such a state would necessarily be valueless; for value is at least awareness, and awareness involves duality of subject and object, hence variety. Moreover, value involves possible degrees and hence contrasts between degrees; and an “actual” value as such must be contrasted to other at least possible values. Finally, bare unity makes being, as Hegel (in so far without sophistry, I take it) maintained, indistinguishable from non-being. For what but the word could be alleged as the difference? But a state of pure variety is equally, though for com [p. 213] plementary reasons, valueless and inconceivable. It would not be a state, or an experience, or a something, even a plurality.
So we have the result that total absence of unity and total absence of variety equally imply total absence of being or value. Now modify the two nonsensical extremes ever so slightly in the direction of sense. At some point reality and value will become possible. But the first value reached in this way will not be maximal value. By infinitesimal steps, only infinitesimal additions to the initial zero of value will be effected. Thus we will have a series of values beginning at zero and going toward either an open or a closed infinity, that is, toward a definite maximum, or simply toward more and more with no possibility of an absolute limit. Since the necessity for some unity and some variety is equal, being in both cases absolute, there can be no reason for favoring one or the other, hence value will be a balance of the two, increasing as both increase pari passu. That both can increase together is due to the multi-dimensionality of existence, and in this relation we have an a priori reason for such multi-dimensionality. You can add to the variety of colors, while increasing the similarity of shapes, or vice versa, or in more subtle ways (for color and shape themselves are multi-dimensional) exploit the fact that likeness and difference are not univocal.
Is the universe as a whole beautiful? Certainly it contains more contrasts than anything else, for all contrasts fall within it. And it does have unity. Physics discovers the same kinds of matter, the same laws, even in the most distant heavenly bodies —so far as the present “cosmic epoch” (Whitehead) is concerned.
But there is one contrast in the world which seems unbalanced by any sufficient unity. This is the contrast between living mind and mere dead matter, between that which has [p. 214] feeling and emotion and memory and desire, and that which totally lacks these traits. Now such a contrast as this between the living and the dead, that which has feeling and that which has none, is not beautiful. For it is the contrast between something and nothing, between the mere presence and the mere absence of a quality, whereas the beautiful contrasts are those between widely separated positive qualities. Red contrasts with green, not as not-green with green, but as one positive quality with another from which it is separated by a wide interval. But there is no positive quality opposed to feeling, memory, will. All we can point to in the so-called inorganic world of rocks, fluids, and the like which might indicate the absence of mind is the simplicity of the individuals which science finds compose these entities. Atoms, molecules, crystals, electrons are indeed simple affairs, compared to the higher animals. But simplicity is not a positive quality; it merely means a low degree of complexity, and hence it is contrasted, not to mind and feeling and will in general, but to complex types of mind and feeling and will.
The way to bring the most beauty into our picture of the world is to regard atoms and the other inferior individuals as very simple, low-grade types of minds, or sub-minds, with their own to us more or less unimaginable feelings. Then we have immense but positive contrasts between the various levels and kinds of mind and feeling. Mind in general becomes the theme of which the entire universe is a system of variations. Materialism lacks any such theme, any real unity in the variety of things, and yet it can point to no positive contrast which the opposing view omits.
Minds and their interrelations form the materials of all beauty. The interrelations of minds constitute what in the broadest sense we may call drama. Drama is the essential art. All other arts tend to serve drama (including [p. 215] under this term the novel, narrative poetry, pageantry, parades, the cinema, and all arts frankly embodying relations between social beings as such). Abstract completely from the dramatic and there would be negligible or even zero beauty left. Even a simple design can express the personality of the designer; even flowers are “empathized,” and seem happy or affectionate; the mere sunshine seems joyous. We see something of life everywhere, and something of individuality — that is, in the broadest sense personality — and something of the interplay of personalities, which is drama, in all life.
What I am urging is that not only would the harmony, the unity in variety, of the world as such be inadequately enjoyed were not all individuals, from electron to cosmos, at the least sentient, but also there would not really be any cosmic harmony to enjoy, even by the human spectator. We find unity and rich contrast where we see some striking variant of the theme of personality, and only there. Animals are fascinating because they are subpersonalities; electrons, because they are dimly envisaged as sub-subpersonalities; heroes, because they are superpersonalities; divinities, because super-superpersonalities; “Nature,” because it is the mysterious supermind whose thoughts are both other than and akin to ours. The poets personify things because otherwise they would be giving aesthetic problems rather than solutions. The only difficulty is that the ranges of personality remote from the human are not adequately expressible in human language, or easily ascertainable by human science, still less by common sense.
But you ask, Has the contrast between the personal and the impersonal no aesthetic value? I answer, yes, as a contrast between and within personalities. There are “unpersonal” persons, that is, their personalities are relevant toa wide range of other personalities, actual and possible, [p. 216] and hence they seem unpersonal to one who wishes for support to his own lack of such catholicity. Also, there is the contrast between individuals, personalities, and groups; and a group may be called unpersonal. A rock is a group of crystals or molecules. But a group is nothing except in and through persons, including not only its members, but its spectators, whose attention and interest unite the members into one object of reference.
Not only does materialism fail to unify mind and matter, but by leading to atheism it also deprives us of some of the principal contrasts of life. No contrast can be so great as that between the creature and the creator, between limited imperfect minds and the all-knowing mind. For this contrast is infinite in every sense in which infinite contrast is possible. The dramatic relation with God is unique among dramatic relations. No other can be a substitute for it, for all other relations are between finite individuals.
But besides losing this unique contrast, atheism also loses equally in unity. For the highest type of mind, the divine, contrasts with al] other minds just in its infinitely superior capacity to unify the diverse. ‘The way to find the most unity in the world is to see it as the expression of a single plan, and the only such plan conceivable is the love of God for the various forms of life and feeling, a sympathy flexible enough to appreciate simultaneously the joys and sorrows of all the multiform individuals inhabiting all the worlds. Thus the divine as love is the only theme adequate to the cosmic symphony.
An electron is a principle of unity-in-contrast on a very small scale, or over a negligible portion of space. An atom is a unification of greater contrasts, covering a larger area. A man is the unity of the region occupied by his body. Thus the higher types of being integrate more of the vari ety of the world. Only the highest conceivable being could integrate the universe as a whole.
[p. 217]
The world as a whole would be infinitely ugly (if, per impossibile, it could even exist) should it fail to exhibit a universal “ theme,” of which all contrasts express “ variations ” —as, for instance, all of a man’s acts express his personality. What is this world theme, for atheism? Matter in motion? Or just “ being”? The one is too narrow, the other is only a word for the problem, since what is sought is a clue in experience to the common nature belonging to being in spite of its variations. Matter in motion is too narrow, for it is structural, not qualitative, and the contrast between qualities, and between qualities and structures, is aesthetically positive. Simply to add to the structural aspect of matter the qualities we know is not to explain the unity of relations and qualities. In experience this unity is the unity of experience as such, and as essentially social, that is, at once relational and with private qualitative characters by virtue of which relations have terms. Matter as the universal theme of existence, really one and really many in all its variations, can only be God in disguise. It has lost of the lower status, and gained of the higher, everything but the word (see chapter 8). The only adequate theme of all variations is the maximally flexible or divine sympathy.
But materialism and atheism are not the only ways in which one can fall into ugly views of the universe. There are forms of theism which are no less incompatible with the principles of beauty. Since the beautiful must contain contrast, it is as necessary that there be variety, multiplicity, in God as that there be unity. Yet theologians have commonly insisted upon the unqualified simplicity of God, his absolute lack of parts and inner complexity, as though that could be anything but unspeakable monotony. (It does no harm to conceive the unchanging or abstract aspect of God as simple, for the beauty of abstractions is not solely in themselves but also in their relations to other aspects of [p. 218] the concrete whole which includes them. But it is this concrete whole which possesses the value and hence deserves the name of God.) First-type theism endeavors to persuade us that God has all the value of variety except variety. The reply is that the value of variety is variety, just as the value of unity is unity. Even the Trinity gives no sufficient, even if so much as conceivable, contrast. What is required is maximal contrast, not only on one level, as between persons of the Trinity, but between levels within the unity of God — for instance, between the contingent or changing and the necessary or immutable.
An attempt to impute variety to God without departing from first-type theism is found in the following passage from Cardinal Newman:
Order and harmony are God’s very essence. To be many and distinct in his attributes, yet after all to be but one — to be sanctity, truth, justice, love, power, wisdom — to be all at once each of these as fully as if he were nothing else but it, and as if the rest were not; this implies in the nature an infinitely sovereign and incomprehensible order, which is an attribute as wonderful as any, and the result of all the others. Such is the unity and consequent harmony and beauty of the Divine Nature.[1]
In so far as the variety of attributes is real variety, secondtype theism is at least equal to first-type. It asserts the unity of the attributes in the same sense. But it does not reduce God toa mere unity of abstractions, all on the same level of generality. It also includes in him the integrated contrast between the particular and the general, and between the multiplicity of divergent particulars. Surely the beauty of a man’s life is not equivalent to the mere concordance of his justice, love, wisdom, and the like with each other; but rather is this concordance a mere aspect of the essential harmony of the man’s particular experiences with [p. 219] each other and with the experiences of other persons in whose life he participates. The terms of harmonic relations are concrete as well as abstract. In spite of Newman’s eloquence, the absolute inner poverty of God as Thomistic theology conceives him cannot be concealed.
The denial of parts and of change to God not only deprives God of contrast within himself, and so of beauty, but it also robs him of unity, and so of beauty in his relation tothe world. For if this relation is to be beautiful, then, in spite of the infinite contrast between creator and creature, there must also bea no less profound similarity. The creature must really be the image of God, and that in all his being, for man must be a variation on the cosmic theme, which is divinity. Here traditional theology tended to sacrifice unity to diversity. Within God the diversity of contingent things was lacking; but between God and things there was little but the sheer contrast between the uncreated creator and the uncreative creature, the purely necessary and the contingent. Man changes; God simply does not. Man hasa body; God has none. Man alters, but cannot, like God, create substance. Thus while God within was ugly by defect of variety, reality, as composed of God and the world, was ugly by defect of unity, and the two defects were clearly two sides of the same defect. For the only way to unify God with his creatures is to regard the unity of God’s being (the supremacy of which lies in its inclusiveness) as the unity of reality as such. And the only way to give maximal diversity as well as unity to God is to allow that his unity genuinely embraces all that is, with all the variety which it really has.
The Scylla and Charybdis of aesthetic failure, monotony and discord, are represented in the two horns of the theistic dilemma so wonderfully set forth by Hume. Either God has nothing in common with man, in which case we can [p. 220] have no conception of him, and theism and atheism are indistinguishable (for what is the idea of God if not that of an analogy between man and the supreme power who made man in His own image?) ; or else God is frankly conceived anthropomorphically, as infected with human weaknesses, and then the idea becomes suspect from the opposite angle. Now the relation of God to man is infinitely ugly unless it is equally true that the two are alike and that they are different, and the relation is infinitely beautiful only if both likeness and difference are in some sense infinite. The aesthetic problem is the same as the metaphysical, except for emphasis upon the conditions of value in the most concrete form, rather than in the merely abstract form of logical coherence.
If God can be conceived as the infinite degree — or such form of maximality as is in each case possible — of whatever variables are applicable in finite degree to man, and man as the finite degree of whatever variables are infinitely applicable to God (see The Universal Orthodoxy) , then the problem is solved both logically and aesthetically. If, for instance, God is not unchanging while man changes, but rather God changes in a manner as different from change in man as is possible while yet really change — that is, if change is varied as much as possible between the two, while yet retaining its generic identity as change — then both unity and diversity in the relationship will be provided for.
Moreover, the unity may be as great as the contrast. For a changing God may by sympathetic participation completely experience the positive qualities of the human being. The aesthetic supremacy of harmony in contrast between persons over lesser harmonies is in the sympathetic parallelism through which what is on one side of the contrast may, more or less completely, appear also on the other. [p. 221] And the infinite or all-apprehending mind is the one in which the parallelism reaches completeness. In spite of, indeed because of, his infinite difference from man, God repeats in himself all positive qualitics and qualitative contrasts that are present in man, including the quite positive contrast between actualization of potency and potency itself, as this contrast is unified in change. God is the mirror of countless finite individuals, endlessly varying the theme of personality, whose range of variations only his uniquely sympathetic, flexible personality can span.
We have then exactly as good motive for insisting upon “univocal” applicability of properties to God and man as for insisting upon maximal contrast within the unity of a property. What is needed is a definite provision for maximal flexibility of concepts, not the substitution of some vague or ambiguous “ analogy ” for strictly common variables.
Aesthetics equally condemns the ideas of a merely perfect and of a merely imperfect deity (first- and third-type theisms). For in either case there is failure of contrast not only not compensated for by more adequate unity but — as we have seen already for first-type doctrine — aggravated by an equal failure of unity. In a wholly imperfect deity the contrast of perfect and perfectible would be lacking; and also such a deity by definition could not represent maximal (perfect) unity, or adequate unification of all that is. He must fall short somewhere in his unification of reality. His sympathy could not integrate all the riches of the world and could not parallel all of its variety.
On the other hand, in the “pure actuality” of first-type theism all contrast vanishes. In God so defined there is either no contrast or, what comes to the same, all possible contrast. For to compose a pattern of all possible contrasts, rejecting none, is to compose no pattern and to lose all contrasts [p. 222] in the sheer continuity of the merely potential (not “actual” at all). It is the possible (grounded in the primordial or abstract nature of God) that is above definite diversity and composition. We get definiteness by restricting the possible, and that restriction is definiteness. You may in a picture combine blue with yellow of some shade, but to combine all hues of yellow with all hues of blue is the same as to do nothing aesthetically. You may go on to other parts of your picture and use more and more hues in these additional parts, but the rejected possible combinations of hue and shape in the first-named parts are rejected once for all, since other parts are other parts because in some characters they fail to duplicate the given parts, either as they are or as they might have been had certain choices been made otherwise. God may enjoy Shelley and Keats together in a manner quite impossible to Shelley or Keats; but what no aesthetic experience can do is to combine the Keats or Shelley that actually was with the Keats or Shelley that might have been, had choices of these men fallen otherwise. For the incompatibility of alternative possibilities is the meaning of possibility, and of all distinctions whatever. The poems Keats could have written no one else in all past or future cosmic history ever could write; for other individuals must, by the very meaning of individuality, lack the personality which is the theme expressed potentially in all the possible states of Keats. The once potential Keats is now forever impossible, and impossible even for God, in the same way as round squares are impossible for him, that is, because it is nonsense that something should be known by omniscience as both actual and not actual, or known as not actual, yet as yielding all the contrasts it would have exhibited had it been actual. That would merely be to say that the actualization of the potential is aesthetically superfluous, and to really believe that would be to cease to actualize, to cease to live.
[p. 223] Thus aesthetics seems to be adequate to decide between. the three types of doctrine, provided only one admits that a thoroughly or infinitely ugly view of the cosmos would be a more radical sacrifice of values — including intellectual values, for what is truth as appealing but intellectual beauty? — than anyone can really make except in words; so that we must regard atheism or first- or third-type theism as pretenses, not real beliefs. One can admit ugly aspects of the world; but to make ugliness the essential pervasive feature, as atheism implicitly does — is that more than a gesture, in beings who continue to go about their business in the world? Or if they do not do so, then how is one to argue with them, if their business be philosophy?
But aesthetics throws yet other light upon theology. Theologians have often done some justice to the beauty of the world, so far as it was defined through structure as correlated with intellect. The world as relational is the satisfying object of mind as the sense for relations. Also, even simple qualities were sometimes admitted to have aesthetic value, as in their simplicity clearly apprehended and so satisfyingly accessible to our awareness. Thus Thomas says “clarity” is a feature of the beautiful, including brilliance or vividness as an aspect of clarity. And God, as supreme knower, corresponds to the world as clear, as God as will does to the world as active. But knowing as sense for relations is distinguishable from knowing as mere having of qualities. There seems but one way to know a quality, and that is to feel it. There is nothing init to think, if by thought is meant relating; for a simple quality is not a relationship, but the term without which relations would not be possible, as the complex presupposes the simple. God must equally know qualities and relations, and how he could know a quality except by having it as a feeling tone, a quality of his experience itself, we have not the faintest clue in experience. There is no intellectual content [p. 224] whatever to the blueness of blue except such as presupposes the non-intellectual, the purely sensory content. A God who knows but never feels, who has no feeling-tones, but only superintellection, or superintuition entirely above the contrast between terms and relations, is an aesthetically hideous or empty conception.
Aesthetics is the study which has finally brought philosophy to take feeling and quality seriously as positive excellences, not defects. It is time that we incorporated this insight into our speculations about God. Either feeling is or it is not reducible to a special case of thinking or willing (or to mere matter in motion); and if it is not, then being as such involves it. For being as such is simply the irreducibles in their unity. Only the idea of God exhibits the unity plainly and vividly, and this only if God be conceived not as without feeling but as more rich in feelingtones than any other being, not as without the experience of potency but as equally supreme in achieved actuality and in potency of actuality to come. We must preserve contrasts, all of them (except those between something and nothing, e.g., knowledge and ignorance, and even such contrasts as vicariously enjoyed) , in God, while ascribing to him a matchless power to hold these contrasts together (so far as intrinsically compatible) in one experience.
It is sometimes said that aesthetics is concerned with essences, not existences, as though possibility were enough for beauty. But I have yet to meet a man who enjoyed merely possible symphonies as much as actual ones. I fear there is a confusion here between two kinds of existence. So long as sensations, or sensory images, of the required kind exist, it does not always matter to us what the physical stimulus of these sensory states may be. But the sensory states exist, and not merely in the mind or experience; they exist also in the sense organs and in the whole [p. 225] body. This is actual existence in the complete sense, it is merely more narrowly localized than some other forms. The distinction between the possible and the actual is of quite another order.
Of course Keats does say that
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone. . . .
But this seems to mean that actual melodies are not the best possible ones, not that possibility as such is equal to actuality. Or perhaps it only means that music is incapable of expressing the profoundest harmonies. Keats was a poet, not a musician.
It may be held that to a strong enough imagination possibles would be as beautiful as actuals. But this raises the question whether or not the completely imagined would be any different from the completely perceived, that is, the actual. It is not to be assumed that “ imagination ” is in essence a dealing with the “possible” but only accidentally a dealing with it as more or less indefinite, and hence aesthetically unsatisfactory. If the possible is not distinguished from the actual by deficient definiteness, how is it distinguished? And if the possible is as good as the actual, then why actualize?
At the opposite extreme, if a “pure actuality” or timeless absolute could contain all possible value as actual, then why should there be a world consisting partly of unactualized potencies? The reason there is a contrast of actual and potential is that both are positive and hence afford a valuable contrast. Possibility is not the mere absence of actuality, it is the non-actual which can become actual, and this can-become-actual is a positive something [p. 226] irreducible to anything else. Moreover, actuality is essentially the has-become-actual of the previously could-become-actual, it carries this previous having-been-potential within itself. (God, as necessary being, is not the being whose actual state is necessary, hence without previous potency, but the being which at all times actualizes in some generically but not determinately specified way an antecedent potency expressive of his unique generic nature.) The contrast between the is and the might have been belongs to the is and is essential to its beauty. Without it, all of being would collapse into a single entity which either had no pattern whatever, no beauty, no harmony, no wealth of variety in unity, or else had but one everlastingly fixed pattern without the hint of an open alternative, the nightmare of monotony carried to the absolute, the “block universe” with which modern man has appalled himself.
The contrasts which give life its value need not be sacrificed in forming the conception of the highest value; rather, we must give to “highest” just such meaning as will express and preserve, not annul, these contrasts, so that the unity of the highest will be a unity of something — not just bare unity. As Fechner so well said, the God of traditional theology (A) is empty unity, as the world of traditional theology is ununified plurality. The “form of forms” lacked content, the content lacked an inclusive form. The cosmic art is the content-with-the-form, the form-with-the-content. It is the one living experience, sublime in its infinite past and present, sublime in its potencies for the future, sublime in the contrast between these, sublime in its multiplicity and variety of parts, sublime in the wholeness to which their partiality is relative God is neither a poem containing all possible poems —a hideous nightmare of the incompossible — nor is he the mere sum of all actual poems, nor yet merely one poem [p. 227] among others, nor finally is he sheerly above all definite patterns and forms. He is rather the never ending poem of which all actual poems are phrases, all cosmic epochs yet elapsed are verses, and whose “to be continued ” is the promise of infinite poetic creation to come. He is the poet as enjoying this poem, the poem as the life of the poet down to the given present. But the phrases of the cosmic poem are themselves poets enjoying their poems. In this respect many aesthetic analogies are false. Thus in poetry words are mere carriers of meaning, they do not possess, enjoy, meanings. Much human art manipulates materials similarly regarded as not themselves enjoying any of the aesthetic experience they make possible. The chorus director or stage manager is in a way closer to God than the poet or painter, who is not an artist dealing, as God does, with lesser artists, recognized as such. (The molecules of pigment or of ink may indeed be sentient, and enjoy rudimentary harmony as well as suffer from rudimentary discord, but this is of no interest to the human artist.) God’s art is superior to man’s not because he “ controls ” his materials more absolutely, but almost the contrary, because he knows how to set the limits within which the living units of his work are to control themselves, to do as they happen to please, not precisely as even he could foresee. Of course this means that the resulting art work cannot exhibit “ perfect” harmony (whatever that would be), and certainly discord, evil, hatred, suffering exist in God’s world if anything exists there. The play of the world is a tragic as well as comic play, for players and for playwright. The social nature of existence makes tragedy in principle, though not in particular, inevitable.
God is the cosmic “adventure” (Whitehead) integrating all real adventures as they occur, without ever failing in readiness to realize new states out of the divine potency, [p. 228] which is indeed “ beyond number” and definite form, yet is of value only because number and form come out of it. God is not the super-staleness of the never new, the never young, the monomania-like poverty — vainly called superrichness — of the merely absolute (just as he is not the blind chaos of the merely relative). As Fechner said, every child that comes into the world and brings a new note of freshness, every youth for whom the world looks young, contributes this freshness — this slightly novel beauty of feeling as well as this feeling of novelty —to God, who is literally the youngest and the oldest of all beings, the richest in accumulated experiences, and consequently the most equipped with suitable background for diverse new ones, as the man with a varied past is apt to have the most capacity to assimilate further variety.
If such a cosmic adventurer did not exist, we should from an aesthetic point of view be compelled, in Voltaire’s phrase, to invent him. The ideal by which the artist is inspired is not any notion of “ absolute beauty” as either a supreme sample or a fixed total of possible beauty. The artist wishes, taking the past of culture as given, to add something new which is both intrinsically valuable or enjoyable, and is appropriate to, enjoyable together with, that past, though by no means deducible from it. He wishes in a small way to simulate the cosmic adventure, to create a note in the next phase of that adventure as visible from his corner of the world. The reformer seeking new beauties of social relationship is essentially in the same attitude, but his “corner” is somewhat different. The only static “ beauty as such ” or timeless absolute which the artist ever contemplates, even subconsciously, is purely abstract, such as the principle of unity in contrast; not any definite unity in contrast or any absolute sum of such unities (which would have neither unity nor contrast since it [p. 229] would be nothing), but the purely general requirement, Let there be as much unity in contrast as possible, both within the new pattern and between it and the old patterns 0 that the pattern of ongoing life shall be unified and diversified. (I have adapted this thought in part from Van Meter Ames.) This is the aesthetic imperative which the artist feels laid upon him by the scheme of things, and it is the voice of God as truly as any other imperative. As Berdyaev says, the service of God consists, not in rule-conforming correctness of behavior, but in that creativeness of new values together with respect for old ones by which man can most truly imitate the everlasting creator.
But the artist has also a concrete ideal, which is by no means timeless. This is his glimpse of the concrete, ever newly enriched beauty of the present actual world; for of what avail would it be to contribute beautiful parts to a whole which was mere chaos or monotony or nothingness in terms of value? Indeed, if the beauty of experience which the artist creates for men is to really “ exist ” in the universe, this universe must as a whole possess a value which exactly provides for his contribution (see chapter 8). Thus an abstract eternal principle of cosmic search for beauty, and a concrete ever growing totality of beauty actually achieved, provide the two senses in which “ absolute beauty ” can rightly be spoken of. Neither one sense nor the other nor both together constitutes an entity absolute or perfect in every sense which these words have sometimes been supposed to bear, but they represent so much of perfection as can really be conceived.
Quoted by John Rickaby, S. J., General Metaphysics (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1890) , pp. 153-54. ↩︎