While there is a beauty of sound, color, and form to act as the root of the feeling, it is to be allowed to Alison that there is a train of ideas and feelings which constitutes, is it were, the growing trunk.But, as Alison has shown, it is not every train of idea, nor even every train of emotional idea, that is fitted to raise emotions which are beautiful or sublime.There is need of a bond of connection to raise the proper kind of ideas, and to make them flow in one direction, so as to produce a uniform result.The objective sound, color, form, proportion, expression, must not only start the association, but must so far guide it along a consistent line; make the ideas and feelings, for instance, which are raised as we stand gazing on a lovely countenance or a lofty waterfall, all to be of a sort and to contribute to one emotional result.
There are two grand oversights in the explanations of Alison: he overlooks the moving power which starts the train, and the guiding rails which direct it.This leaves a very great gap in his theory: he has no objective ground for beauty; and this has set against it both artists and scientific investigators, who are apt to turn away from it with unbelief or with scorn, saying that they are not to be taken in by this illusory picture, for they are sure that beauty is a reality in the thing itself.It is the business of science, by its own methods, to investigate the precise objective nature of sounds, colors, and forms; and there is ground for believing that the laws involved will at last be enunciated in mathematical expressions.
But there is a higher element than all this in beauty;an element seen by Plato and by those who have so far caught his spirit,-- such as, Augustine, Cousin, MacVicar, and Ruskin, but commonly overlooked by men of science and the upholders {315} of the association theory.The mere sensations or perceptions called forth by the presence of harmonious sounds, colors, and proportional forms, is not the main ingredient in the lovely and the grand.Beauty, after all, lies essentially in the ideas evoked.I hold by an association theory on this subject.But the ideas entitled to be called aesthetic should be of mind, and the higher forms of mind, intellectual and moral.There was, therefore, grand truth in the speculation of Plato, that beauty consists in the bounding of the waste, in the formation of order out of chaos; or, in other words, in harmony and proportion.There was truth in the theory of Augustine, that beauty consists ill order and design; and in that of Hutcheson, that it consists in unity with variety.
Alison had, at times, a glimpse of this truth, but then lost sight of it.He speaks with favor of the doctrine held by Reid, that matter is not beautiful in itself, but derives its beauty from the expression of mind; he holds it true, so far as the qualities of matter are immediate signs of the powers or capacities of mind, and in so far as they are signs of those affections or dispositions of mind which we love, or with which we are formed to sympathize.He thus sums up his views: " The conclusion, therefore, in which Iwish to rest is, that the beauty and sublimity which is felt in the various appearances of matter are finally to be ascribed to their expression of mind; or to their being, either directly or indirectly, the signs of those qualities of mind, which are fitted, by the constitution of our nature, to affect us with pleasing or interesting emotion."There is a singular mixture of truth and error in this statement: truth, in tracing all beauty and sublimity to the expression of mind; but error, in placing it in qualities which raise emotion according to our constitution.Beauty, and sublimity are not the same as the true and the good; but they are the expression and the signs of the true and the good, suggested by the objects that evidently participate in them.{316}
