THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture by CLAUDE BRAGDON, F.A.I.A. MCMXXII "Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity" --EMERSON By the Same Author: Episodes From An Unwritten History The Golden Person In The Heart Architecture And Democracy A Primer Of Higher Space Four Dimensional Vistas Projective Ornament Oracle CONTENTS I THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE II UNITY AND POLARITY III CHANGELESS CHANGE IV THE BODILY TEMPLE V LATENT GEOMETRY VI THE ARITHMETIC OF BEAUTY VII FROZEN MUSIC CONCLUSION PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION _The Beautiful Necessity_ was first published in 1910. Save for a slim volume of privately printed verse it was my first book. I worked hard on it. Fifteen years elapsed between its beginning and completion; it was twice published serially--written, rewritten and tre-written--before it reached its ultimate incarnation in book form. Confronted now with the opportunity to revise the text again, I find myself in the position of a surgeon who feels that the operation he is called upon to perform may perhaps harm more than it can help. Prudence therefore prevails over my passion for dissection: warned by eminent examples, I fear that any injection of my more mature and less cocksure consciousness into this book might impair its unity--that I "never could recapture the first fine careless rapture." The text stands therefore as originally published save for a few verbal changes, and whatever reservations I have about it shall be stated in this preface. These are not many nor important: _The Beautiful Necessity_ contains nothing that I need repudiate or care to contradict. Its thesis, briefly stated, is that art in all its manifestations is an expression of the cosmic life, and that its symbols constitute a language by means of which this life is published and represented. Art is at all times subject to the _Beautiful Necessity_ of proclaiming the _world order_. In attempting to develop this thesis it was not necessary (nor as I now think, desirable) to link it up in so definite a manner with theosophy. The individual consciousness is colored by the particular medium through which it receives truth, and for me that medium was theosophy. Though the book might gain a more unprejudiced hearing, and from a larger audience, by the removal of the theosophic "color-screen," it shall remain, for its removal now might seem to imply a loss of faith in the fundamental tenets of theosophy, and such an implication would not be true.