Aesthetics: The science of beauty

The several sciences offer for their pursuit their own appropriate rewards; but not unfrequently do we find a most grateful gratuity in the new beauties which they reveal. Beauty is so inextricably interwoven with truth, that, when seeking the last, we yet inevitably find the first, and with it a new reward and motive of effort. So also is it in the mechanical labors of life. Our work lies amid nature and natural forces, and we cannot with a delicate intuition move in that great gallery of the germis, suggestiolns, studies, and models of all great work, without finding each step a pleasure. Art may also, in its higher forms, become fine art, and in all its forms call into requisition the rudiments of beautiful expression, in its lines and out lines and surfaces. Thus may pleasure still run through all the wearier passages of life, the love of the he,xti fu come in as a most welcome impulse, and save our duties from becoming wholly mechanical, an irksome routine, by giving to them the elasticity of a rational sentiment. Beauty, then, is not only with the intellectual as against the physical, but is an ally in all worthy effort, furnishing a new motive to do, and a new satisfaction in that which is well done. Allied to what has been presented as motives for the cultivation of taste, and yet from its character and importance deserving distinct notice, is the connection of beauty with right, and of discipline of thought in one department with that in the other. The methods of reasoning employed in the discussion of these two classes of questions are similar. This will hereafter appear more plainly. We must for the present rest in the assertion, that, alike in ethics and aesthetics, we are employed with an intuition of the reason, and this, not absolute and unchangeable, but varying with all the new circumstances and relations of each particular case.