55. OBJECTIVE FACTORS IN THE CONSTITUTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL.—“Ask the artist,” writes St. Augustine,(201) “whether beautiful things are beautiful because they please us, or rather please us because they are beautiful, and he will reply unhesitatingly that they please us because they are beautiful.” What, then is it that makes them beautiful, and so causes the esthetic pleasure we experience in contemplating them? In order that an object produce pleasure of any sort in a conscious being it must evoke the exercise of this being’s faculties; for the conscious condition which we describe as pleasure is always a reflex of conscious activity. Furthermore, this activity must be _full_ and _intense_ and _well-ordered_: if it be excessive or defective, if it be ill-regulated, wrongly distributed among the faculties, it will not have pleasure for its reflex, but either indifference or pain. Hence the object which evokes the esthetic pleasure of contemplation must in the _first_ place be _complete_ or _perfect_ of its kind (46). The truncated statue, the stunted oak, the deformed animal, the crippled human being, are not beautiful. They are wanting in the integrity due to their nature. But this is not enough. To be beautiful, the object must in the _second_ place have a certain _largeness_ or amplitude, a certain greatness or power, whereby it can act _energetically_ on our cognitive faculties and stimulate them to _vigorous_ action. The little, the trifling, the commonplace, the insignificant, evokes no feeling of admiration. The sight of a small pasture-field leaves us indifferent; but the vision of vast expanses of meadow and cornfield and woodland exhilarates us. A collection of petty hillocks is uninteresting, while the towering snow-clad Alps are magnificent. The multiplication table elicits no emotion; but the triumphant discovery and proof of some new truth in science, some far-reaching theorem that opens up new vistas of research or sheds a new light on long familiar facts, may fill the mind with ecstasies of pure esthetic enjoyment.(202) There is no moral beauty in helping up a child that has stumbled and fallen in the mud, but there is in risking one’s life to save the child from burning or drowning. There must, then, be in the object a certain largeness which will secure energy of appeal to our cognitive faculties; but this energy must not be excessive, it must not dazzle, it must be in proportion to the capacity of our faculties.(203)