The same thing is true of painting and poetry and sculpture. The
feelings which inspire them and the feelings which they arouse in
receptive souls are totally independent of the intellect.
The reason may argue that as one leg of the Venus de Milo is found by
measurement to be considerably shorter than the other, it is absurd to
call that a beautiful figure of a woman--or that it should excite as
much admiration as a scientifically constructed statue in which all the
proportions would be in accord with carefully tabulated statistics.
As a photograph of a young and healthy girl is more accurate and more
pleasing in subject than a painting of an old woman, what reason is
there for it to arouse less esthetic feeling than an immortal portrait
by Rembrandt?
If a description of a small water course, drawn up by a surveyor and a
lawyer, is exact and comprehensive, why should it not appeal to the
imagination and sense of beauty more satisfactorily than a poem by
Tennyson, entitled "The Brook?"
The obvious answer is that in all such questions the intellect is out of
its element, trying to lay hands on something which has no tangible
substance.
If this point-of-view is not enough to give your intellect food for
thought and suggest its very decided limitations in the life of man, you
may turn its light upon the simplest and most material sensations and
feelings which belong to the animal nature and are common to all
mankind.
What reason is there for my brother to dote on fried onions, while I
cannot endure them? Why does my uncle like pig's feet and eels and
snails, while my wife is made almost ill at the sight of them? Your
intellect may tell you that you ought to like the taste of castor oil,
because it is good for you; but all the intellect in the world cannot
make you like the taste of castor oil.
The taste, the savor, the feel of things--whether it be in the material
world, or the esthetic world, or the spiritual world--is a part of life
in which the intellect is forever condemned to remain an outsider. It
may be very much interested in what is going on, it may reason with the
causes and effects and characteristics of what it sees; it may make
suggestions to the will-power and argue against the impulses which are
prompted by the feelings; but it cannot prevent the feelings, or the
impulses, from being there and having their say.
The life and say of the feelings mean much to the welfare of each
individual. Let us suppose that the circumstances of my life were such
that I could truthfully express myself as follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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