life. It springs from the original reservoirs of life. It has
depths which no mental logic can sound; and it has horizons in the
presence of which the mind stops baffled. When we use the term "the
beautiful" to indicate the nature of what it reveals, we are easily
misled; because in current superficial speech--and unless the word is
used by a great artist--the term "beautiful" has a narrow and limited
meaning. Dropping the term "taste" then, as having served its
purpose, and reverting to the more academic phrase "aesthetic
sense" we must note that the unfathomable duality revealed by this
aesthetic sense covers, as I have hinted, much more ground than is
covered by the narrow terms "beauty" and "ugliness."

It must be understood, moreover, that what is revealed by the aesthetic
sense is a struggle, a conflict, a war, a contradiction, going
on in the heart of things. The aesthetic sense does not only reveal
loveliness and distinction; it also reveals the grotesque, the bizarre,
the outrageous, the indecent and the diabolic. If we prefer to use the
term "beauty" in a sense so comprehensive and vast as to include
_both sides_ of this eternal duality, then we shall be driven to regard
as "beautiful" the entire panorama of life, with its ghastly contrasts,
with its appalling evil, with its bitter pain, and with its intolerable
dreariness.

The "beautiful" will then become nothing less than the whole
dramatic vortex regarded from the aesthetic point of view. Life with
all its contradictions, considered as an aesthetic spectacle, will
become "beautiful" to us. This is undoubtedly one form which the
aesthetic sense assumes; the form of justifying existence, in all its
horror and loathsomeness as well as in all its magical attraction.

Another form the aesthetic sense may assume is the form of "taking
sides" in this eternal struggle; of using its inspiration to destroy,
or to make us forget, the brutality of things, by concentrating our
attention upon what in the narrow sense we call the beautiful or the
distinguished or the lovely. But there is yet a third form the
aesthetic sense may assume. Not only can it visualize the whole
chaotic struggle between beauty and hideousness as itself a beautiful
drama; not only can it so concentrate upon beauty that we forget the
hideousness; it is also able to see the world as a humorous spectacle.

When the aesthetic sense regards the whole universe as "beautiful"
it must necessarily re