h a stimulus, dart into
a new thought, and give birth to that with which it is already
pregnant; but the fertilizing seed came from elsewhere, from study
and admiration of those definite forms which nature contains, or
which art, in imitation of nature, has conceived and brought to
perfection.

_Illusion of infinite perfection._

Sec. 36. The great advantage, then, of indeterminate organization is
that it cultivates that spontaneity, intelligence, and imagination
without which many important objects would remain unintelligible,
and because unintelligible, uninteresting. The beauty of landscape,
the forms of religion and science, the types of human nature itself,
are due to this apperceptive gift. Without it we should have a chaos;
but its patient and ever-fresh activity carves out of the fluid
material a great variety of forms. An object which stimulates us to
this activity, therefore, seems often to be more sublime and
beautiful than one which presents to us a single unchanging form,
however perfect. There seems to be a life and infinity in
the incomplete, which the determinate excludes by its own
completeness and petrifaction. And yet the effort in this very
activity is to reach determination; we can only see beauty in so far
as we introduce form. The instability of the form can be no
advantage to a work of art; the determinate keeps constantly what
the indeterminate reaches only in those moments in which the
observer's imagination is especially propitious. If we feel a certain
disappointment in the monotonous limits of a definite form and its
eternal, unsympathizing message, might we not feel much more
the melancholy transiency of those glimpses of beauty which elude
us in the indeterminate? Might not the torment and uncertainty of
this contemplation, with the self-consciousness it probably
involves, more easily tire us than the quiet companionship of a
constant object? May we not prefer the unchangeable to the
irrecoverable?

We may; and the preference is one which we should all more
clearly feel, were it not for an illusion, proper to the romantic
temperament, which lends a mysterious charm to things which are
indefinite and indefinable. It is the suggestion of infinite perfection.
In reality, perfection is a synonym of finitude. Neither in nature
nor in the fancy can anything be perfect except by realizing a
definite type, which excludes all variation, and contrasts sharply
with every other possibility of be