the other of us is mistaken
than that each is right from his own point of view. Be that as it may,
I should be the last man in the world to differ from Mr. Hambidge,
for if he convicted me of every conceivable error his work would still
remain the greatest justification and confirmation of my fundamental
contention--that art is an expression of the _world order_ and
is therefore orderly, organic; subject to mathematical law, and
susceptible of mathematical analysis.

CLAUDE BRAGDON

Rochester, N.Y.

April, 1922

I

THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE

One of the advantages of a thorough assimilation of what may be called
the theosophic idea is that it can be applied with advantage to every
department of knowledge and of human activity: like the key to a
cryptogram it renders clear and simple that which before seemed
intricate and obscure. Let us apply this key to the subject of art,
and to the art of architecture in particular, and see if by so
doing we may not learn more of art than we knew before, and more of
theosophy too.

The theosophic idea is that everything is an expression of the
Self--or whatever other name one may choose to give to that immanent
unknown reality which forever hides behind all phenomenal life--but
because, immersed as we are in materiality, our chief avenue of
knowledge is sense perception, a more exact expression of the
theosophic idea would be: Everything is the expression of the Self
in terms of sense. Art, accordingly, is the expression of the Self in
terms of sense. Now though the Self is _one_, sense is not one, but
manifold: and therefore there are _arts_, each addressed to some
particular faculty or group of faculties, and each expressing some
particular quality or group of qualities of the Self. The white light
of Truth is thus broken up into a rainbow-tinted spectrum of Beauty,
in which the various arts are colors, each distinct, yet merging one
into another--poetry into music; painting into decoration; decoration
becoming sculpture; sculpture--architecture, and so on.

In such a spectrum of the arts each one occupies a definite place, and
all together form a series of which music and architecture are the two
extremes. That such is their relative position may be demonstrated in
various ways. The theosophic explanation involving the familiar idea
of the "pairs of opposites" would be something as follows. According
to the Hindu-Aryan theory, Brahma, that the world might be born