dea, is to state
a truism. In a work of architecture the cooerdination of its various
parts with one another is almost the measure of its success. We
remember any masterpiece--the cathedral of Paris no less than the
pyramids of Egypt--by the singleness of its appeal; complex it may be,
but it is a coordinated complexity; variety it may possess, but it is
a variety in an all-embracing unity.

The second law, not contradicting but supplementing the first is the
law of _Polarity_, i.e., duality. All things have sex, are either
masculine or feminine. This too is the reflection on a lower plane
of one of those transcendental truths taught by the Ancient Wisdom,
namely that the Logos, in his voluntarily circumscribing his infinite
life in order that he may manifest, encloses himself within his
limiting veil, _maya_, and that his life appears as spirit (male), and
his _maya_ as matter (female), the two being never disjoined during
manifestation. The two terms of this polarity are endlessly repeated
throughout nature: in sun and moon, day and night, fire and water, man
and woman--and so on. A close inter-relation is always seen to subsist
between corresponding members of such pairs of opposites: sun, day,
fire, man express and embody the primal and active aspect of the
manifesting deity; moon, night, water, woman, its secondary and
passive aspect. Moreover, each implies or brings to mind the others
of its class: man, like the sun, is lord of day; he is like fire, a
devastating force; woman is subject to the lunar rhythm; like water,
she is soft, sinuous, fecund.

The part which this polarity plays in the arts is important, and the
constant and characteristic distinction between the two terms is a
thing far beyond mere contrast.

In music they are the major and minor modes: the typical, or
representative chords of the dominant seventh, and of the tonic (the
two chords into which Schopenhauer says all music can be resolved): a
partial dissonance, and a consonance: a chord of suspense, and a chord
of satisfaction. In speech the two are vowel, and consonant sounds:
the type of the first being _a_, a sound of suspense, made with the
mouth open; and of the second _m_, a sound of satisfaction, made by
closing the mouth; their combination forms the sacred syllable Om
(_Aum_). In painting they are warm colors, and cold: the pole of
the first being in red, the color of fire, which excites; and of the
second in blue, the color of wate