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some real object before us? The images suggested may afford the sources of the delight; but the delight itself must be in some way modified, before it is converted into beauty. There is another part of the process, then, which we have not yet considered, to which it is necessary to direct your attention.

What is truly most important to the emotion of beauty, is this very part of the process which theorists have yet neglected. It is not the mere suggestion of certain conceptions, general or particular, for these often form a part of our trains of thought, without any very lively feeling as their consequence. It is the fixing and embodying of these in a real object before us, which gives to the whole, I conceive, one general impression of reality. This, I have little doubt, takes place, in the manner explained by me in former Lectures, when I treated of the peculiar influence of objects of perception, in giving liveliness to our trains of suggestion, and consequently greater liveliness to all the emotions which attend them. The delight of which we think, when images of the past arise, is very different from the delight which seems to be embodied in objects, and to meet our very glance, as the terror of the superstitious, when they think of a spectre in twilight, is very different from that which they feel, when their terror is incorporated in some shadowy form that gleams instinctively on their eye. But for a process of the kind which I have stated, I do not see how the effect of beauty, as seen, should be so very different as it most certainly is, from the effect produced by a long meditation on all those noble and gracious characters of virtue and intelligence, the mere expression, that is to say, the mere suggestion of which is stated to be all which constitutes it. It is, in short, as I have said, this very part of the process which seems to me the most important in the whole theory of beauty.

The increased effect of that incorporating process, which I suppose, in the case of beauty, is, in truth, nothing more than what we have found to take place in all the cases of suggestion of vivid images, by objects of perception, rather than by our fainter and more fugitive conceptions. The reality of what is truly before us, gives reality to all the associate images that blend and harmonize with it. We think of ancient Greece-we tread on the soil of Athens or Sparta. Our emotion, which was before faint, is now one of the liveliest of which our soul is susceptible, because it is fixed and realized in the existing and present object. The same images arise to us, but they coexist now as they rise, with all the monuments which we behold, with the land itself, with the sound of those VOL. II.-T t

waves, which are dashing now as they dashed so many ages before, when their murmur was heard by the heroes of whom we think-all now lives before us, and when we behold a beautiful form, all the images suggested by it, live in like manner in it. It does not suggest to us what was once delightful, but it is itself representative of what was once delightful. The visions of other years exist again to our very eyes. We see embodied all which we feel in our mind; and the source of delight which is itself real, gives instant reality to the delight itself, and to all the harmonizing images that blend with it. We may, even in solitude, think with pleasure of the kindness of smiles and tones which we have loved; but when a smile of the same kind is beaming on us, or when we listen to similar tones, it is no longer a mere dream of happiness, the whole seems one equal perception, and we are surrounded again, as it were, with all the vivid happiness of the past.

Though the result of our inquiry into original beauty, then, has led us to adopt the greater probability of some original susceptibilities of emotions of this sort, that are independent of the arbitrary associations which must be formed in the progress of life, we have found sufficient reason to ascribe to this slow and silent growth of circumstances of adventitious delight, almost all the beauty which is worthy of the name:and we have seen, I flatter myself, in what manner these circumstances operate in inducing the emotion. This happy effect, I have shewn to be too instantaneous to be the result of a rapid review or suggestion of many particulars, in each se parate case, but to depend on the combination with the objects which we term beautiful, of some instant complex feeling of past delight, or of those general notions of beauty and excellence, which themselves, indeed, originally resulted from the observation of particulars, but which afterwards are capable of being suggested as one feeling of the mind, like our other general notions of every species; and when combined with objects really existing, or felt as if really existing, to derive from this impression of reality in the harmonizing objects with which they are mingled in our perception, a liveliness without which they could not have exercised their delightful dominion on our heart.

Such, I conceive, then, in the principles on which it depends, is that delightful dominion, which is exercised on our heart, not directly by mind only, but by the very forms of inanimate

nature.

"Hence the wide universe,

Through all the seasons of revolving worlds,

Bears witness with its people, gods and men,
To Beauty's blissful power, and, with the voice
Of grateful admiration, still resounds;-
That voice, to which is Beauty's frame divine,
As is the cunning of the master's hand

To the sweet accent of the well tuned lyre."

• Pleasures of Imagination, second form of the poem, B. I. v. 682—689.

332

LECTURE LVII.

I. IMMEDIATE EMOTIONS, NOT INVOLVING NECESSARILY ANỲ MORAL FEELING-3. BEAUTY AND ITS REVERSE CONCLUDED -4. SUBLIMITY,-LIKE BEAUTY, A MERE FEELING OF THE MIND-SOURCES OF SUBLIMITY.

FOR Several Lectures, Gentlemen, we have been engaged in considering one of the most interesting of our emotionsan emotion connected with so many sources of delight, material, intellectual, and moral; that it is not wonderful that it should have attracted, in a very high degree, the attention of metaphysical inquirers, and should even have become a subject of slight study, with those lovers of easy reading, to whom the word metaphysical is a word of alarm, and who never think that they are studying metaphysics, when they are reading only of delicate forms, and smiles, and graces. What they feel, in admiring beauty, is an emotion so very pleasing, that they connect some degree of pleasure with the very works that treat of it, and would perhaps be astonished to learn, that the inquiry into the nature of this emotion, which it would seem to them so strange not to feel, is one of the most difficult inquiries in the whole philosophy of mind.

It may be of advantage, then, after an analytical investigation, which is in itself not very simple, and which has been so much confused by a multitude of opinions, to review once more, slightly, our progress and the results which we have obtained.

In whatever manner, the pleasing emotion itself may arise, and however simple or complex it may be, we term beautiful, the object by which it is excited. But though, philosophically, a beautiful object be considered by us merely as that which excites a certain delightful feeling in our mind, it is only philosophically that we thus separate completely the object from the delight which it affords. It is impossible for us to gaze on it, without reflecting on it this very delight, or even to think of it, without conceiving some spirit of delight diffused in it,--a never-fading pleasure, that, as if in independence of

our perception, exists in it or floats around it, as much when no eye beholds it, as when it is the gaze and happiness of a thousand eyes.

Such in its reflection from our mind, on the object that seems to embody it, is the beauty which we truly feel; and if the objects that excite it were uniformly the same in all mankind, little more would have remained for inquiry. But, far from being uniform in its causes, in all mankind, the emotion is not uniform in a single individual, for a single year, or even, in the rapid changes of fashion, for a few months of a single year. These rapid changes, at once so universal and so capricious in their influence, led us naturally to inquire, whether fashion, in all its arbitrary power, and other circumstances of casual association, peculiar to individual minds, be not the modifiers only, but perhaps the very sources of all those emotions which seem to vary with their slightest varieties.

In this inquiry, which from the peculiar circumstance in which alone it is in our power to enter on it, cannot afford absolute certainty of result, but only such a result as a comparison, of greater and less probabilities affords, we were led, on such comparison, to a conclusion favourable to the supposition, that the mind has some original tendencies to receive impres sions of beauty, from certain objects, rather than from others, thought it has, without all question, at the same time, other tendencies, which may produce feelings inconsistent with the pleasing emotion, that otherwise would have attended the contemplation of those objects, or sufficient of themselves to constitute the pleasing emotion, in cases in which there was no original tendency to feel it,-that what is beauty, therefore, at one period of life, or, in one age or country, even in cases in which there may have been an original tendency to feel it, may not be beauty, at another period of life, or in another age or country, from the mere difference of the arbitrary circumstances, which have variously modified the original tendency, in the same manner as we find circumstances capable of modifying, or even reversing other species of emotions,--this difference of result being, not of itself, a proof of the unreality of all original distinctions of this sort, more than the prejudices and delusions of mankind, and their varying desires, are a proof, that truth and error are themselves indifferent, and all things originally equally desirable. It is like the descent of one of the scales of a balance, from which alone it would be absurd to conclude, that the whole weight is in that single scale. The descent may have arisen only from the preponderance of a greater weight over a less, when, but for the addition of some new substance thrown into it, the

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