thus revealed as a many-sided whole--the amount of real
existence increases in proportion to the increase of capacity for
sharing in form and reason; and along with this goes a growth in
power to appreciate the ever higher forms of beauty which
emerge in the upward-striving universe.

A further thought calls for emphasis. For beings like ourselves,
living under conditions which involve so many limitations, a
_purely_ aesthetic judgment is practically out of our reach. And
on this score also we may venture to tone down the strong
expressions used by Jefferies in his estimate of the anti- or
ultra-human character of the strange creatures in the sea. Individual
likings and dislikings are the resultants of an enormously
complex system of impulses, instincts, prejudices, motives,
habits, associations, and the rest. Few of these factors appear
above the threshold of consciousness, though they are
continually and influentially operative. Hence it by no means
follows that because a particular object is displeasing or
disgusting to one individual, or group of individuals, it will be
so to all. So undoubted is the resulting relativity of our aesthetic
judgments that Hegel was inclined to hold that below the level
of man and art there is no real ugliness at all. "Creatures" (he
says) "seem ugly to us whose forms are typical of qualities
opposed to vitality in general, or to what we have learnt to
regard as their own special or typical form of animate existence.
Thus the sloth as wanting in vitality, and the platypus as
seeming to combine irreconcilable types, and crocodiles and
many kinds of insects, simply, it would appear, because we are
not accustomed to consider their forms as adequate expressions
of life, are all ugly."

Just as, in music, discords become beautiful by being brought
into fitting relations with other parts of an ordered whole, so is
it with objects which are usually considered ugly, but which are
capable of aesthetic beauty when treated in pictures by masters
of their craft. To set them in new and fitting relations of light
and shade, of colour and composition, is to transform them.
Schopenhauer lays great stress on the transforming power of art.
He instances many typical paintings of the Dutch school, simple
interiors, homely scenes, fruit, vegetables, the commonest tools
and utensils, even dead flesh--all are taken up into material for
pictures, and, in their special setting, compel our admiration.

We