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51
and good, the triumph of the higher reason and will? If in answer
to this we call to mind that beauty is only a realisation in physical forms
of that very thing which, until then, had been known as the
good and the true, then this provokes a fresh objection. The good and
the true, the strict moralist will say, do not need an aesthetic realisation.
To do good, and to know the truth, is all that is necessary.
In reply to this objection let us suppose that good has been realised,
and this, not in any individual life, but in the life of society as a -whole,
that an ideal organisation of society has been attained, that universal
brotherhood prevails. Let us suppose that egoism has been abolished,
that all men see themselves in each, and each in all. But if this general
unity, in which lies the essence of moral good, does not extend to material
nature, if the spiritual principle after penetrating the density of human
psychological egoism cannot force a way into the egoism of matter,
then the power of goodness or love is not sufficiently strong. This
means that the moral principle cannot be realised to the full and completely justified. The question then arises: if the power of matter
triumphs in the end, if it cannot be conquered by the principle of good,
then there does not reside in that power the real truth of existence,
and is not that which we call good merely a subjective delusion? And,
indeed, is it possible to speak of the triumph of good, when a society
organised in accordance with ideal moral principles may be destroyed
in a moment by some geological or astronomical convulsion? The
complete separation of the moral principle from matter is by no means
destructive to the latter, but it is to the former. The very existence of
moral order in the world presupposes its connection with the material,
some co-ordination between the two. But if this is so, ought we not
to seek this connection, apart from aesthetics, in the direct control of
the blind powers of nature by human intelligence, in the absolute
supremacy of mind over matter? It is evident that great progress
towards this goal has already been made. When it has been reached,
when, thanks to the progress of the applied sciences, we have conquered,
as some optimists think we shall, not only time and space but even
death, then the existence of a moral life on earth (on a material basis)
will be finally secured, and this without any connection whatever with
aesthetics, so that even then it may be maintained that beauty is not
necessary for the existence of the good. But, in such a case, would the
good itself be complete? It is seen that it consists, not in the triumph
of one thing over another, but in a free, all-embracing unity. But is it
possible to exclude from this unity beings and agents of the natural
world? As we cannot, we may not look upon them merely as meanls
or instruments of human existence; they, too, are bound to enter as
a positive element into the ideal organisation of our life. If moral order
to be stable is bound to rest upon material natire as the medium and
means of its existence, then, for its own fulness and perfection, it must
include matter as an independent ethical factor. In this case the ethical
D 2
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55
concentrated, purified, and idealised form, he produces by his intensification of a given beauty an ideal anticipation of the perfect. Thus
architecture reproduces in an idealised aspect the known regular forms
of natural bodies, and expresses the victory of the ideal forms over the
fundamental anti-ideal property of matter-gravity. Classical sculpture
idealises the beauty of the human form, while strictly observing the fine
but precise line which separates the beauty of the body from that of the
flesh, and thus it anticipates in its images that spiritual corporeality which
will one day be revealed to us in a living reality. Landscape painting
(and in part lyrical poetry) reproduces in a concentrated aspect the ideal
side of the complex phenomena of external nature. It liberates them
from the casual properties of matter-even from its three dimensions.
Religious paintings and poetry are idealised reproductions of those
phenomena in the history of mankind, in which the higher meaning of
our life was foreshown. (3) The third kind of oestheticalanticipation of a
future perfect reality is indirect and negative. It arises from the reflection
of the ideal in a non-corresponding medium, typified and intensified by
the artist so as to give a clearer reflection. The non-correspondence
between a given reality and the ideal or higher meaning of life may vary
in kind. In the first place a certain human reality, in itself perfect and
beautiful (that is in the sense of the natural man) does not, however,
satisfy that absolute ideal for which the spiritual man and humanity
are destined. Achilles and Hector, Priam and Agamemnon, Krishna,
Ardjuna and Rama are undoubtedly beautiful, but the more artistically
they and their doings are depicted, the clearer it is in the end that they
are not real people, and that it is not their exploits which constitute the
true concern of men. Homer in all probability, and certainly the Indian
poets, had not this thought in view, and we are bound to regard the
heroic epic as an unconscious and confused reflection of the absolute
ideal in a beautiful but inadequate human reality, which for this reason
is doomed to destruction.
We find a profounder connection with the unrealised idea in tragedy,
where the very characters represented are penetrated by the consciousness of the inner contradiction between their reality and that which
ought to be. Comedy, however, strengthens and deepens the feeling
of the ideal in a different way. In the first place, it emphasises that
part of reality which in no sense of the word can be called beautiful.
In the second place, it exhibits the characters living in that reality as
being fully satisfied with it, and thus it intensifies their contradiction
with the ideal. It is this self-satisfaction, and by no means the external
relations of the subject that constitutes the essential indication of the
comic as distinguished from the tragic element. Thus, for instance,
CEdipus,who killed his father and married his own mother, might still
have been a very comical character, if in his strange adventures he had
assumed a good-natured self-satisfaction, considering that everything
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