can come to be something only in a
foreign organism, a plant or an animal. In form is seen the dawning of
individuality, and just as the thing rises in the scale the principle of
form becomes dominant. The handful of earth is sufficiently described by
the chemist's formula,--these ingredients make this substance. But an
organic body cannot be so described. The chemist's account of sugar, for
instance, is C^{6} H^{10} O^{5}. But if we ask what starch is, we have,
again, C^{6} H^{10} O^{5},--and the cellular tissue of plants, also, is
the same. These things, then, as far as he knows, are identical.
Evidently, he is beyond his depth, and the higher we go in the scale the
less he has to say to the purpose,--the separate importance of the
material ingredients constantly decreasing, and the importance of their
definite connection increasing, as the reference to an individual centre
predominates over helpless gravitation. First, aggregation about a
centre, as in the crystal,--then, arrangement of the parts, as upper,
under, and lateral, as in the plant,--then, organization of these into
members. Form is the self-assertion of the thing as no longer means
only; this makes its attractiveness to the artist. The root of his
delight in ideal form is that it promises some finality amid the endless
maze of matter. But this higher completeness, which is beauty, whether
it happen to exist or not, is never the immediate aim of Nature. It is
everywhere implied, but nowhere expressed; for Nature is unwearied in
producing, but negligent of the product. As soon as the end seems
anywhere about to be attained, it is straightway made means again to
something else, and so on forever. The earth and the air hasten to
convert themselves into a plant, the flower into fruit, the fruit into
flesh, and the animal at last to die and give back again to the air and
the earth what they have transmitted to him. Whatever beauty a thing has
is by the way, not as the end for which it exists, and so it is left to
be baffled and soiled by accident. This is the "jealousy of the gods,"
that could not endure that anything should exist without some flaw of
imperfection to confess its mortal birth.

The world is full of beauty, but as it were hinted,--as in the tendency
to make the most conspicuous things the most beautiful, as flowers,
fruits, birds, the insects of the sunshine, the fishes of the surface,
the upper side of the leaf; and perhaps more distinctly (in a