John La Farge, the American artist who was a profound student of oriental art, suggests this undefined law of harmony in the universe when he says: “I might acknowledge that I have far within me a belief that art is the love of certain balanced proportions and relations which the mind likes to discover and to bring out in what it deals with, be it thought, or the action of man, or the influences of nature, or the material things in which the necessity makes it to work. I should then expand this idea until it stretched from the patterns of earliest pottery to the harmony of the lines of Homer. Then I should say that in our plastic arts the relations of lines and spaces are, in my belief, the first and earliest desires. And again, I should have to say that, in my unexpressed faith, these needs are as needs of the soul and echoes of the laws of the universe, seen and unseen, reflections of the universal mathematics, cadences of the ancient music of the spheres.” “For I am forced to believe that there are laws for our eyes as well as for our ears, and that when, if ever, these shall have been deciphered, as has been the good fortune with music, then shall we find that all best artists have carefully preserved their instinctive obedience to these, and have all cared together for this before all.” “For the arrangements of line and balances of spaces which meet these underlying needs are indeed the points through which we recognize the answer to our natural love and sensitiveness for order, and through this answer, we feel, clearly or obscurely, the difference between what we call great men and what we call the average, whatever the personal charm may be.” _Conclusion_ It may seem ruthless to destroy the old conception which attributed to the works of the painter and sculptor a place superior to or above the works of men in the field of science or in other spheres of activity, but this, I think, is rapidly being done. The idea that man is capable of adding anything to or improving upon the supreme qualities of beauty as these exist in nature is disappearing. The spirit of a scientific age is dispelling the old conception of art. Men now realize in art as in science that the quality of truth is the sole object to be sought. [SN: _Lord James Bryce_]