Читать книгу Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classificatin of Beauty in Woman - Alexander Walker - Страница 10

On the subject of the preceding chapter, even the reasonings of Hume appear to me to be of too vague and indefinite a kind. It requires the more minute scrutiny into which I shall now enter, in order to place it upon a deeper and more scientific foundation. If I can here show that, in the material qualities of the objects of nature and art, there exist elements of beauty equally invariable in themselves and in the kind of effect they produce upon the mind, it is evident there can be no farther dispute about a standard of beauty.

Many attempts have been made to determine the material elements of beauty, by Hogarth, Home, and others. All have more or less failed, from not observing that these elements are modified, varied, and complicated, as we advance from the most simple to the most complex class of natural beings, or of the arts which relate to these respectively. Many partial views of perfect truth and great interest have been taken, and by every one of these it will be my duty here to profit: but, from the failure just pointed out, no philosophical and systematic doctrine of beauty, ascending from its origin in elements through its higher combinations, has ever been attained by any of the numerous, deep, acute, and elegant thinkers who have devoted their time to this subject, as the foundation of taste and of the fine or intellectual arts.

Profiting, as I ought to do, by the partial views of these philosophers, I pretend here only to take one larger view—to analyze, to generalize, to systematize, the materials which they present to me.

In the hope of accomplishing this, I shall now endeavor successively to trace the elements of beauty which belong respectively to inanimate, living, and thinking beings, and to the useful, ornamental, and intellectual arts which have a reference to these, the neglect of all which I have described as the fundamental cause of previous failure.

Again, I repeat, it is to this analysis and generalization alone, and to the systemization founded upon it, that I make any pretence. The materials have long been presented by all the great writers on the subject: they have only left them in confusion, and without conclusion. I shall now proceed to employ them.