It is primarily an outward
thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing;
what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to
plot,--its cardinal idea,--that the necessary harmony of parts, the
chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as
fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as
fate is in its temporal movement. And as plot has its characteristic
unity in the impersonal order of God's will, shown in time's event, so
beauty has its characteristic unity in the same order shown in the
visible creation of space. It is true that all phenomena are perceived
by the mind, and are conditioned, as is said, by human modes of
perception; but within the limits of the relativity of all our
knowledge, beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and
though the structure of the human eye arranges the harmonies of line and
colour, it is no more than as the form of human thought arranges cause
and effect and other primary relations in things; beauty does not in
becoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing external,
independent of our will, and imposed on us from without.
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