etto Croce, the Italian philosopher, is surely right when
he asserts that no one can enter into the true spirit of a work of art
without exercising upon it something of the same creative impulse
as that by the power of which it originally came into existence. In
the contemplation of a statue or a picture or a piece of bric-a-brac,
in the enjoyment of a poem or an exquisite passage of prose, just
as much as in the hearing of music, the soul of the recipient is
projected beyond its normal limitation in the same way as the soul
of the creator was projected beyond its normal limitation.

The soul which thus gives itself up to Beauty is actually extended
in a living ecstasy of vibration until it flows into, and through, and
around, the thing it loves. But even this is an inadequate
expression of what happens; for this outflowing of the soul is the
very force and energy which actually is engaged in re-creating this
thing out of what at present I confine myself to calling the
"objective mystery."

The emotion of the soul plays therefore a double part. It
half-discovers and half-creates the pervading beauty of things; and it
also loses itself in receptive ecstasy, in embracing what it has
half-created and half-found.

We have now reached a point from which we are able to advance
yet another step.

Since what we call beauty is the evocation of these two confronted
existences, the existing thing which we call the soul and the
existing thing which we call the objective mystery, it follows that
there resides, as a potentiality, in the nature of the objective
mystery, the capacity for being converted into Beauty at the touch
of the soul. There is thus a three-fold complication of reality in
this thing we call the beauty of the universe.

There is the individual, human, subjective reality of it, dependent
upon the temperament of the observer. There is the universal
potential reality of it, existing in the objective mystery. And finally
there is the ideal reality of it, objective and absolute as far as we
are concerned, in the vision that I have called "the vision of the
immortals." If it be asked why, in all these ultimate problems, it is
necessary to introduce the vision of the immortals, my answer is
that the highest human experience demands and requires it.

At those rare moments when the "apex-thought" reaches its
rhythmic consummation the soul is conscious that its subjective
vision of Truth and Beauty merges itself and