It is as easy to know the slightness of
earnest haste from the slightness of blunt feeling, indolence, or
affectation, as it is to know the dust of a race, from the dust of
dissolution.
CHAPTER XI.
GENERAL INFERENCES RESPECTING TYPICAL BEAUTY.
Sec. 1. The subject incompletely treated, yet admitting of general
conclusions.
I have now enumerated, and in some measure explained those
characteristics of mere matter by which I conceive it becomes agreeable
to the theoretic faculty, under whatever form, dead, organized, or
animated, it may present itself. It will be our task in the succeeding
volume to examine, and illustrate by examples, the mode in which these
characteristics appear in every division of creation, in stones,
mountains, waves, clouds, and all organic bodies; beginning with
vegetables, and then taking instances in the range of animals from the
mollusc to man; examining how one animal form is nobler than another, by
the more manifest presence of these attributes, and chiefly endeavoring
to show how much there is of admirable and lovely, even in what is
commonly despised. At present I have only to mark the conclusions at
which we have as yet arrived respecting the rank of the theoretic
faculty, and then to pursue the inquiry farther into the nature of vital
beauty.
As I before said, I pretend not to have enumerated all the sources of
material beauty, nor the analogies connected with them; it is probable
that others may occur to many readers, or to myself as I proceed into
more particular inquiry, but I am not careful to collect all conceivable
evidence on the subject. I desire only to assert and prove some certain
principles, and by means of these to show, in some measure, the inherent
worthiness and glory of God's works and something of the relations they
bear to each other and to us, leaving the subject to be fully pursued,
as it only can be, by the ardor and affection of those whom it may
interest.
Sec. 2. Typical beauty not created for man's sake.
Sec. 3. But degrees of it for his sake admitted.
Sec. 4. What encouragement hence to be received.
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