Perhaps Mr Eastlake may reply, that the simile expresses _privation_ of life, and therefore shows the matter capable of receiving it; but this appears further to involve the necessity of association, which denies the beauty of the line _per se_. The idea of privation is a sentiment; but the question is, if there be _a_ line of beauty independent of sentiment or association. Let us attempt to answer it by another--the opposite. Is there _a_ line of ugliness? We think there is not: if there be, what line? certainly not a straight line, (we must not here refer any to an object.) Perhaps we may not be very wrong in saying that _a_ line _per se_ is one of "indifference"--similar to that state of the mind before, as Burke says, we receive either pain or pleasure. May we not further say that, very strictly speaking, there is no one line but the straight--that every figure is made up of its inclinations, which are other or equivalent to other lines? If there be any truth in this, the "line of beauty" (here adopting for a moment the word) is not a single but a complicated thing: the straight line has no parts, until we make them by divisions: the curved line has parts by its deviations, which constitute a kind of division, without the abruptness which the divided straight line would have. The organ of sight requires a moving instinct: that instinct is curiosity; but that is of an inquiring, progressive nature. Without some variety, therefore, in the object, it would die ere it could give birth to pleasurable sensation. It is too suddenly set to rest by a straight line _per se_; but when that line is combined with others, the sense is kept awake, is exercised; and it is from the exercise of a sense that pleasure arises. Too sudden divisions, by multiplying one object, distract; but in the curve, in the very variety, the unity of the object is preserved. A real cause may possibly here exist for what we will still call a "line of beauty," without referring it at all to so complicated a machinery of thought as that of life, with its antagonistic principle, with which it continually contends. This is, doubtless, physically and philosophically true; but it is altogether a thought which gives beauty to the idea of the line after we have contemplated it--not before. The line may rather give rise to and illustrate the philosophical thought, than be made what it is by that thought, which it altogether precedes.