Theism and Humanism: Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1914Balfour, Arthur James
Religion
Theism and Humanism: Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1914
Balfour, Arthur James
Humanism; Naturalism; Theism
Are we, then, to lay down one rule for artistic beauty and another rule
for natural beauty? Must the first be expressive, but not the second?
Is creative mind necessary in one case, and superfluous in the other?
And if in the case of nature it be necessary, where is it to be found?
On the naturalistic hypothesis, it is not to be found at all. The glory
of mountain and of plain, storm and sunshine, must be regarded as
resembling the kaleidoscopic pattern of which I just now spoke; with
this difference only—that the kaleidoscope was designed to give _some_
pattern, though no one pattern more than another; while nature was not
designed with any intention at all, and gives us its patterns only by
accident.
I know not whether you will think that this train of thought is helped
or hindered by bringing it into relation with our scientific knowledge
of natural realities. The world which stirs our æsthetic emotions is
the world of sense, the world as it appears. It is not the world as
science asks us to conceive it. This is very ill-qualified to afford
æsthetic delight of the usual type; although the contemplation of
complicated relations reduced to law may produce an intellectual
pleasure in the nature of æsthetic interest. Yet none, I think, would
maintain that mass and motion abstractly considered, nor any concrete
arrangement of moving atoms or undulating ether, are beautiful as
represented in thought, or would be beautiful could they become objects
of perception. We have a bad habit of saying that science deals with
nothing but “phenomena.” If by phenomena are meant appearances, it
is to æsthetics rather than to science that, on the principle of
Solomon’s judgment, phenomena most properly belong. To get away from
appearances, to read the physical fact behind its sensuous effect, is
one chief aim of science; while to put the physical fact in place of
its sensuous effect would be the total and immediate ruin of beauty
both in nature and in the arts which draw on nature for their material.
Natural beauty, in other words, would perish if physical reality and
physical appearance became one, and we were reduced to the lamentable
predicament of perceiving nature as nature is!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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