is no longer a personal and changing sentiment we express, but an universal judgment, and an objective law imposed on all men. * * * Standing before the Apollo Belvidere, I declare it to be beautiful; am I not here convinced that I do not utter a personal opinion, but the judgment of all the world? I enforce my impression upon no one, but I feel I have a right to impose reason on all. It is the same in the case of natural beauty." (pp. 24–28.)

Having distinguished natural beauty from the agreeable-showing that the one is absolute and universal, the other relative and personal-he proceeds to consider ideal beauty, and in what order the two kinds of beauty (natural and ideal) unfold themselves to our minds.

"Ideal beauty is evolved from real" (used by our author always as synonymous with natural) "beauty by an immediate abstraction, which perceives the one in the other. The operation is two-fold. If it were not, we should obtain the individual by itself, or the absolute by itself; that is to say, life" (the natural) "without the ideal, or the ideal without life. Art must devote itself to the production of the ideal and of nature equally.

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"The ideally beautiful having been distinguished from natural beauty, we ask, What is idea! beauty? The beautiful is identical with the good and the true; there are not many truths, but one truth. Give me a truth, and I engage to find another more sublime and vast. Give me a good action, and I will find a better one. So is it with ideal beauty; it remains undeterinined; it is a point which is ever shifting; it is ever tending towards the Infinite. Every work of art is therefore only an approximation; the last term of the ideal is in the Infinite-is in God. Between the point where human efforts expire, and God, there is a chasm which cannot be filled up. It is thus with the true; you can never attain the true in itself; and it is thus with the good. We have to purify the real" (or natural) "to raise it to a lofty height. Still, the absolute good is more pure and more lofty, and we can never attain unto it. The Infinite is the origin and the foundation of all that is. It reveals itself to us in the true, the beautiful and the good. In descending from this supreme existence, we arrive at supreme beauty, which is the least distant from the infinite type, yet which is ever afar off; and thence, step by step, we descend to real beauty; we traverse a multitude of intermediate stages as we descend; we meet art and all degrees of art-the Apollo, the Venus, the Jupiter, &c.-and lower still beneath art, nature, and all degrees of natural beauty. Remember that all these different domains touch and penetrate each other, as it were. Beneath the beautiful you find the agreeable; that is, after objects of judgment you meet objects of sensation. Do not forget, above all, that the beautiful and the agreeable, though different, may be sometimes simultaneous, and that, in that case, the judgment and the sensation accompany each other." (p. 38.)

In the very interesting reflections which our author then proceeds to make upon art, we will not follow him, wishing to confine ourselves entirely to the examination of his theory of beauty. The end and object of art being the expression of the beautiful, the discussion of the former pre-supposed an investigation of the latter, and it would be impossible to comprise both in the limits of a single article. Let us continue to unfold the author's Philosophy of the Beautiful in his own language. He thus sums up what he has to say on the subject of natural and ideal beauty, and the order in which they present themselves to our minds.

"First, natural beauty appears to us as composed of the individual and the absolute; this is complexness, obscure, confused, indistinct. Presently, immediate abstraction separates the absolute from the individual, and arrives at a condition pure and simple. Thus, after having pierced at once through mixed beauty, we attain pure and true beauty, and the ideal is discovered. At our starting point there is no ideal, but only real beauty, natural beauty, beauty enwrapped in the concrete, hid in complexuess. As soon as abstraction has disengaged it, it shines forth in all simplicity. Ideal beauty differs from natural beauty in that the second falls at once under the observation of the senses and the mind, while the first is never seen with the eye, and resides entirely in the purely intellectual conception. Natural beauty may be seen-ideal beauty can only be thought of." (p. 49.)

Having thus examined in what natural and ideal beauty consist, and how we get from one to the other; having shown" that to the two-fold character of beauty-that is, to the absolute and the individual, to oneness and variety— there correspond two internal phenomena, viz: judgment and sensation," our author next proceeds to consider what he calls "the sentiment of the beautiful"—that which we feel, when an object, which the judgment, the reason, pronounces beautiful, is presented to us. After refuting many theories, which have been advanced respecting the nature of this sentiment, and showing that it is "pure and disinterested love," divested of every foreign idea-that it is referable neither to the agreeable, the pathetic, the useful, nor to imitation, to religion or morals-that it is distinct and special-he proceeds to point out "the way in which it is blended with the imagination-that complex phenomenon of which it is the most important element." Despairing of being able to condense, in our own language, the close, compact and subtle reasoning of our author, we must again somewhat copiously transcribe him.

"The human mind developes itself in a series whose second term is memory. When sensation and judgment and sentiment have been awakened in me, on the occasion of any external object, they can reproduce themselves even in the absence of that object; and the memory submits passively to this reproduction. The phenomenon of passive memory is two-fold; not only do I recall that I have been in the presence of a certain object, which gives me the idea of the past, but I also retrace that object with all its details; the remembrance then becomes an image. In this latter case, the memory has been called by some philosophers, the imaginative memory. The propriety of this term we do not examine here; we only affirm, that memory, as a faculty, reproducing images, is confined within the limits of passivity. This passive, involuntary memory, is regarded as the first element of imagination.

"We pass to a second; the will, it is said, concerns itself with images furnished by the passive memory. It selects different traits which it associates and combines; this complete, voluntary abstraction is called Imagination. But is imagination only this? the man who has the faculty of recalling all the images of the past, and who joins to this memory a voluntary abstraction, a power of choosing from among the materials of experience-is he endowed with the creative faculty? We think not. They who think that he is, seem to omit one of the prime elements of imagination; we allude to the judgment and the sentiment of the beautiful, the pure love which appears in the work of the intelligence and the memory, and gives warmth and light to both We have not imagination merely in order to remember, to abstract. and to combine; otherwise, the cold Geometrician, who passes from deduction to deduction, from theorem to theorem, may take the name of Artist. When my memory instinctively recalls objects with their forms; or when by the force of my will I evoke them; when, these images having been evoked, I abstract them and associate them again—in all this, I see nothing but memory and reason. Now, is it with memory and reason only, that a Michael Angelo, or a Raphael is made? Would it have been sufficient for Corneille to have recalled historic facts, and combined them with skill in order to compose Les Horaces? Independently of a great memory, and a powerful reason, these wonderful men possessed enthusiasm, love; not the vulgar love to which physical sensibility gives birth, but that pure and disinterested love which we call, the Sentiment of the Beautiful. * * * Thus, the imagination is the association of the sentiment with the other faculties of the mind it is love combined with memory, and reason and will. Take away sentiment and all becomes cold and inanimate; let it reveal itself, and everything catches its warmth, its colours, its life. * * * Who has drawn out the plan of a poem? It is reason. Who has given it life and charm? It is love. Who has directed reason and love? It is the will. You see then, how difficult it is, to discern the superiority of one of these elements over another; to

produce the beautiful, the will must work with love according to the the rules of reason. (Chap. v. pp. 75—90.)

In the succeeding chapter M. Cousin discriminates most admirably between the Beautiful and the Sublime which he truly remarks, "it is so much the custom in general conversation to confound, persons for the most part not perceiving" that the sublime differs from the beautiful in kind as well as in degree." He gives in an Appendix at the end of his volume, a table in which the principal differences are concisely and strikingly exhibited. Our limits forbid. our giving extracts from this portion of his treatise, nor is it necessary for the unfolding of his theory to do so. He then proceeds to show that all beauties are reducible to unity (which is an essential law of art)—that is unity of nature and essence. And it is here that the elevation and spirituality of his theory are most strongly shown and most eloquently expressed. Whatever value may be put on such metaphysical, and from the nature of the subject, always more or less unsatisfactory and inconclusive speculations, we cannot but feel that such views concerning the true nature of beauty as are to be found in the following passages, must tend to enlarge, elevate and purify our conceptions of it-to make us realize more fully that there is something in its mysterious influence and power which is not "of the earth, earthy," but super-sensual and divinethat it is indeed) if with all reverence we may say so) one of the forms in which God reveals himself to us-in which he speaks to our souls in tones, by the spiritually minded not to be misunderstood-which thrill us with adoration, love and gratitude. We need offer no apology for the length of our extract.

"The beautiful and the sublime are but the shadowings of the beauty unfolded in the physical, the moral and the intellectual world. Physical beauty or the beauty of form and motion, is only the reflection of that moral and intellectual beauty which we may embrace under the term, spiritual or immaterial beauty. Thus, all beauty in my opinion, resolves itself into spiritual beauty; it is in this inward and hidden region that the secret unity of all kinds of beauty reposes. Let us confirm the opinion by passing through the different domains of beauty.

"Place yourself before the statue of Apollo, and observe attentively what strikes you in this master-piece. Winklemann-who was not a metaphycian, but an artist who was gifted with the highest genius, and who understood the procedure of art - Winklemann has made an analysis of the Apollo. It is interesting to study this analysis, and perceive

by it how physical is blended with spiritual beauty. That which first of all struck Winklemann was the character of nobleness, pride and divinity impressed upon every line of the statue. The forehead is that of Jove, whence sprang the Goddess of Wisdom; it is unchangeably calm; indignation swells the nostrils; scorn rests upon the lips; the attitude of the body, the arms and feet, all proclaim the vanquisher of Python. The tranquil, and disdainful joy felt in triumphing over a contemptible enemy, the delight of victory, the slight effort that victory has cost, these shone forth upon the eyes of Winklemann from the glorious statue. The analysis of this artist is a hymn to spiritual beauty, but strange to say, he has not perceived it: he has not seen that all that beauty, whose traits he has collected with such affection, is but the manifestation of an internal beauty; that it was incorporeal beauty which shone through its veil; in a word, that the beauty of the Apollo Belvidere can be summed up in the word, Expression."

"Let us pass now from a cold and inanimate statue to a living, real man; we shall find that the physical can be beautiful only on the condition, that it be subservient to moral beauty. Suppose a man is entreated to sacrifice his duty to his fortune, and refuses: you admire his pure-mindedness, the inward spiritual beauty; but if at this moment his countenance seems marked with beauty-if his attitude is nobleis it not because the interior breathes, as it were, through the outward; and is there a single trait in his figure that appears beautiful to you under any other name than expression? The face of this man, perhaps, in other circumstances, would seem common and even unmeaning; but here, lit up by the soul which it shews forth, it is effulgent with the signs of morality, and, therefore, of beauty. So the form of Socrates, without the mind which animates it, is vulgar, ugly, and quite out of place among the Grecian models. This figure becomes sublime when the philosopher in his dungeon converses with his disciples on the immortality of the soul-when he forgives the gaoler who offers him the hemlock-when he prepares calmly to die. Do not, however, be deceived: it is not the outline of matter, in regard to pure surface and form, that receives the impress of sublimity; it is matter vivid, alive— that is, expressive matter, matter exhibiting mind, throwing aside its enshrouding veil. At the highest point of moral sublimity to which Socrates attains, he dies; you see only his corpse; the dead figure for a time preserves all its beauty, because it preserves the traces of the soul which animated it; but by degrees the lines alter and grow faint; the expression departs and vanishes; the figure has again become vulgar and ugly. The expression of death is hideous and sublime; hideous, when we see but the decomposition of matter-sublime, when it awakens in us the idea of eternity, or the idea of nothingness, that other kind of infinity. **** The inward alone is beautiful. There is no beauty except that which is invisible; and, if beauty were not discovered to the eye, or, at least, suggested, sketched, as it were, by visible forms,