Hence the world has always been puzzled in its
judgment of the Platonists; their theories are so extravagant, yet
their wisdom seems so great. Platonism is a very refined and
beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it embodies
conscience and utters our inmost hopes. Platonic philosophers have
therefore a natural authority, as standing on heights to which
the vulgar cannot attain, but to which they naturally and
half-consciously aspire.

When a man tells you that beauty is the manifestation of God to
the senses, you wish you might understand him, you grope for a
deep truth in his obscurity, you honour him for his elevation of
mind, and your respect may even induce you to assent to what he
says as to an intelligible proposition. Your thought may in
consequence be dominated ever after by a verbal dogma, around
which all your sympathies and antipathies will quickly gather, and
the less you have penetrated the original sense of your creed, the
more absolutely will you believe it. You will have followed
Mephistopheles' advice: --

Im ganzen haltet euch an Worte,
So geht euch durch die sichere Pforte
Zum Tempel der Gewissheit ein.

Yet reflection might have shown you that the word of the master
held no objective account of the nature and origin of beauty, but
was the vague expression of his highly complex emotions.

It is one of the attributes of God, one of the perfections which we
contemplate in our idea of him, that there is no duality or
opposition between his will and his vision, between the impulses
of his nature and the events of his life. This is what we commonly
designate as omnipotence and creation. Now, in the contemplation
of beauty, our faculties of perception have the same perfection: it is
indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the
occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that
we draw our conception of the divine life. There is, then, a real
propriety in calling beauty a manifestation of God to the senses,
since, in the region of sense, the perception of beauty exemplifies
that adequacy and perfection which in general we objectify in an
idea of God.

But the minds that dwell in the atmosphere of these analogies are
hardly those that will care to ask what are the conditions and the
varieties of this perfection of function, in other words, how it
comes about that we perceive beauty at all, or have any inkling of
divinity. Only the other philosoph