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almost if not entirely alone, to utility, to speed, to tonnage, to strength, to buoyancy, to making the most of a gentle breeze, and yet to withstanding the most violent hurricane. And is not this very fitness, this nice adaptation for utility an element of beauty? Or, for another example, consider another mechanism, primarily designed for practical purposes alone-the locomotive engine. How nice its arrangement and order; how beautiful the passage of thought, in the adaptation from the wood and water to the fire and steam; from the steam to its calculated force when compressed; from the valve-box to the cylinder, to the moving piston; from the piston-rod to the crank; from the crank to the wheel; from the driving-wheel to the great mass of produce, and stores, and passengers, which it urges along; from them to the great marts connected by the passage, and so to the commerce and civilization of the world.

Thus, as the world progresses to a higher civilization, Science and Art, with magic powers, have transformed chaos into order, dark and dingy substances into the brilliant diamond, deformity into beauty; and have thus created a new element in art, making what were before purely mechanical arts to rank among the fine arts, and demanding that the fine arts shall also display utility as a distinguishing element.

Again; although beauty and grace are everywhere interwoven with the useful, it is, by no means, only

on this account that they are to be sought and cultivated: it is because they have also an inherent utility entirely their own: because in contemplating them we enjoy a pleasure, a satisfaction of desire which God meant for us; and because, to the imagination, this contemplation and this enjoyment are as necessary as food, dwellings, and raiment are for our bodies. Thus, linked with our ordinary conception of the useful, and thus containing the useful, in an extraordinary manner, beauty pervades all Arts, and breathes upon all forms of existence.

But we need no further illustration to show us that the useful Arts are rapidly becoming elegant or fine Arts, and that some other distinction or classification will be necessary.

Suppose, then, that instead of endeavouring to classify these complex and varying Arts, we strive to find out the elements of beauty in them all, by the establishment of a new science, whose end shall be to analyze and explain the beautiful. This is the end and aim of the Science of Esthetics.

Esthetics, derived from the Greek, aloonois (perception), means the science of the beautiful, or, in an extended sense, the philosophy of taste.

Esthetics as a science has struggled into permanence against the most determined opposition; it was for sometime domiciled in Germany, where indeed, in its modern form, it came into existence.

It has principally been employed upon Painting and Sculpture, as the most prominent and exclusive of the fine Arts; but its scope is commensurate with the existence of beauty, and every art in which beauty is found is subjected to its analysis. In this connection it will been seen that Rhetoric, as one of the Fine Arts, has long needed its control; for Rhetoric has not only the beauties of expression, which may be styled the aesthetics of language, to bring to its standards, but also the beauties of imagination and of rhetorical invention, which may be justly styled the aesthetics of thought.

Since this science then seeks for beauty everywhere, and, as we have seen, destroys in part at least the old division of Arts, finding in almost all, more or less, developed the elements of beauty, the many Arts in which beauty in its varying forms predominates, have been called Esthetic Arts, and thus we may properly say of an art that it is more or less an Esthetic Art.

Among these Rhetoric, it is observed, holds a prominent place, as will be further evident, when we see that it subsidizes the power of the imagination, the play of the softer passions, the charms of language, and in oratory, the graces of speech, of gesture, of form, the expression of the eye, the curve of the lip, and the smile, which plays like rippling light upon the countenance; and that all these beauties are

means beautifully adapted to a useful end. Rhetoric is essentially then an Esthetic Art.

It has been said that this science of Esthetics was very much needed; it was not more needed by any Art than by Rhetoric; because, before its creation to fill a vacant niche-wit and humour, as rhetorical instruments; beauty and sublimity of objects, and of thought, and of their description in writing; indeed, all that came, either in thought or diction, within the domain of taste, were absolutely without a place among the classified sciences, and were baldly stated as existing without being referred to any scientific classification.

They are now all included under Rhetorical Esthetics; and rules are laid down for judging of the beautiful in discourse.

(16.) Objective and Subjective.

It may not be amiss, while on this general topic of the philosophy of the beautiful, to explain the meaning of two other words much used but frequently misunderstood, especially in their connection with Painting and Sculpture. They are the words objective and subjective, and they are particularly applicable to the consideration of Rhetoric. These are words of recent introduction in our language, but they were much needed before they came.

To explain these, let us take any grammatical sentence having a subject, a finite verb, and an object. Now in Philosophy, as in Grammar, the subject is supposed in every case to be thinker, the person acquainted with, or the person acting; while the object is the thought, the person or thing known, or the person or thing acted upon.

But the subject and the object are only such relatively to each other, for it is evident that every subject may become an object: for, if I conceive of the given subject as related to the given object, then both are objects to me, for I am the thinker and they the things thought of.

Let this give us the clue then to the meaning of these terms: objective means that which really and essentially belongs to the object itself; subjective means the manner in which the subject, or individual, conceives of that object. And thus objectivity means the existence of the world around me quite independent of my conceptions of them, while subjectivity means the expression of my views of the world around me.

The objective painter or writer displays things, or portrays persons, as they exist, free from any prejudice or peculiarity of his own; such as would spring from his school, or his nationality, or his own personal views.

While the subjective writer gives us the peculiar

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