- the minds that ask all questions and judge of the validity
of all answers, -- we are not ourselves independent of this world in
which we live. We sprang from it, and our relations in it determine
all our instincts and satisfactions. This final questioning and sense
of mystery is an unsatisfied craving which nature has her way of
stilling. Now we only ask for reasons when we are surprised. If we
had no expectations we should have no surprises. And what gives
us expectation is the spontaneous direction of our thought,
determined by the structure of our brain and the effects of our
experience. If our spontaneous thoughts came to run in harmony
with the course of nature, if our expectations were then continually
fulfilled, the sense of mystery would vanish. We should be
incapable of asking why the world existed or had such a nature,
just as we are now little inclined to ask why anything is right, but
mightily disinclined to give up asking why anything is wrong.

This satisfaction of our reason, due to the harmony between our
nature and our experience, is partially realized already. The sense
of beauty is its realization. When our senses and imagination find
what they crave, when the world so shapes itself or so moulds the
mind that the correspondence between them is perfect, then
perception is pleasure, and existence needs no apology. The duality
which is the condition of conflict disappears. There is no inward
standard different from the outward fact with which that outward
fact may be compared. A unification of this kind is the goal of our
intelligence and of our affection, quite as much as of our aesthetic
sense; but we have in those departments fewer examples of success.
In the heat of speculation or of love there may come moments of
equal perfection, but they are unstable. The reason and the heart
remain deeply unsatisfied. But the eye finds in nature, and in some
supreme achievements of art, constant and fuller satisfaction. For
the eye is quick, and seems to have been more docile to the
education of life than the heart or the reason of man, and able
sooner to adapt itself to the reality. Beauty therefore seems to be
the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its
possibility. If perfection is, as it should be, the ultimate
justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral
dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity
between the soul and nature, and consequ