The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
(_α_) If indeed the form and only the form renders in some way visible
this inward harmony and its necessity, it may be because we look
upon this juxtaposition as the _habitual_ relation of such members,
a connection which brings to our view some specific type and the
oft-repeated formal exemplifications of such a type. But the necessity
of custom is after all only a _subjective necessity._[229] According
to such a principle we may find certain animals ugly for no other
reason than that we find in them an organism which differs from our
ordinary experience, or runs contrary to it. For this reason we call
the organisms of certain animals bizarre in so far as the way in which
their organs are related together is foreign to what is more common to
our experience or entirely contradicts it. Fishes whose bodies are in
size out of all proportion to their length of tail, or those in which
we find eyes together on one side of the head only, are an example. In
the world of plants we are already prepared to find many such strange
departures from type, although the cactus with its spines, and the more
rectilinear shaping of its angular junctures[230] may still arouse our
wonder. The more a man is educated, however, in all branches of natural
history, the more able he will be to recognize in their truth the
subordination of all parts of organic life, and carry in the memory the
greatest variety of types in their proper classification, and the less
anything he may observe will surprise him.