The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic TheorySantayana, George
Philosophy
The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory
Santayana, George
Aesthetics
Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-regioned star
Or vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky.
The same poet can say elsewhere of a passionate lover:
He arose
Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star,
Amid the sapphire heaven's deep repose.
How opposite is all this from the cold glitter, the cruel and
mysterious sublimity of the stars when they are many! With these
we have no Sapphic associations; they make us think rather of
Kant who could hit on nothing else to compare with his categorical
imperative, perhaps because he found in both the same baffling
incomprehensibility and the same fierce actuality. Such ultimate
feelings are sensations of physical tension.
_Defects of pure multiplicity._
Sec. 26. This long analysis will be a sufficient illustration of the
power of multiplicity in uniformity; we may now proceed to point
out the limitations inherent in this form. The most obvious one is
that of monotony; a file of soldiers or an iron railing is impressive
in its way, but cannot long entertain us, nor hold us with that depth
of developing interest, with which we might study a crowd or a
forest of trees.
The tendency of monotony is double, and in two directions
deadens our pleasure. When the repeated impressions are acute,
and cannot be forgotten in their endless repetition, their monotony
becomes painful. The constant appeal to the same sense, the
constant requirement of the same reaction, tires the system, and we
long for change as for a relief. If the repeated stimulations are not
very acute, we soon become unconscious of them; like the ticking
of the clock, they become merely a factor in our bodily one, a
cause, as the case may be, of a diffused pleasure or unrest; but they
cease to present a distinguishable object.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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