moods are determined by our more or less complete practical concern with Appearance, our more or less complete blindness to Reality. We have gone back to a lower, more primitive stage. In our limited and still largely determined existence we are bound to be occupied in a great measure with appearance. The practical must dominate the theoretic activity; the spirit must be unbalanced, asymmetrical. Even in our moments of greatest symmetry our apprehension of the Real is largely at second hand. _Pace_, Croce, we would say--as we have said already[24]--that the Immanent cannot have immediate contact with the Real; man’s intuitions belong to his transcendence where they deal with the absolutely Real. Man immanent and limited is immediately in contact with God immanent and self-limited; only in so far as man is transcendent is he in contact with God Transcendent, and so in touch with the Whole. In his immanence man lives by symbols, which are sacraments; and here we find the symbolic aspect of Beauty. It is the material basis of this symbolic side of Beauty, rather than Beauty absolute, that has of necessity received most attention hitherto; and the puzzles of rival theories have arisen through failure to realise that a symbol is a partial expression of a reality, and that it can only be fully grasped when the reality which it symbolises is understood. A symbol has something of the reality itself, or it would not be a symbol, but it does not represent that reality adequately, or it would be co-extensive with it; would _be_ the reality itself. Beauty is thus subjective, in so far as it is necessarily the work of the spirit. But it is objective in so far as the reality of which it is the knowledge is personal and external to the self, and will always remain external, however complete the interpenetration of personalities, since personalities cannot be merged and lost in each other, but remain eternally in their self-identity[25]. A natural object _per se_ is not beautiful; only so far as it is understood as a partial representation of Reality, a symbol, is it beautiful. Naturally, this statement arouses the objection that to most people the music of Grieg, if not of Bach, the pictures of Leighton, if not of Utamaro, are beautiful; and that there is a general consensus of opinion that the view over the Severn from the Windcliff, or the view of Lisbon from the harbour is more beautiful than Wormwood Scrubbs. The answer to the first part of this objection is obvious. In music, painting, verse, we are re-creating for ourselves the artist’s intuition. We know that he found beauty, and he has abstracted in his art in such a way as to render the beauty more easily recaptured. The artist is then our guide. He was an artist because his spirit was more sensitive to the reality than ours, and we follow him.