of his own. This fidelity is a condition of progress.
When he has learned to appreciate whatever is aesthetically appreciable
in his problem, he can go on to refine his construction, to ennoble, and
finally to decorate it. As fish, flesh, and fowl have specific forms,
each more or less beautiful and adorned, so every necessary structure
has its specific character and its essential associations. Taking his
cue from these, an artist may experiment freely; he may emphasise the
structure in the classic manner and turn its lines into ornament, adding
only what may help to complete and unite its suggestions. This
puritanism in design is rightly commended, but its opposite may be
admirable too. We may admit that nudity is the right garment for the
gods, but it would hardly serve the interests of beauty to legislate
that all mortals should always go naked. The veil that conceals natural
imperfections may have a perfection of its own. Maxims in art are
pernicious; beauty is here the only commandment. And beauty is a free
natural gift. When it has appeared, we may perceive that its influence
is rational, since it both expresses and fosters a harmony of
impressions and impulses in the soul; but to take any mechanism
whatever, and merely because it is actual or necessary to insist that it
is worth exhibiting, and that by divine decree it shall be pronounced
beautiful, is to be quite at sea in moral philosophy.

Beauty is adventitious, occasional, incidental, in human products no
less than in nature. Works of art are automatic figments which nature
fashions through man. It is impossible they should be wholly beautiful,
as it is impossible that they should offer no foothold or seed-plot for
beauty at all. Beauty is everywhere potential and in a way pervasive
because existence itself presupposes a modicum of harmony, first within
the thing and then between the thing and its environment. Of this
environment the observer's senses are in this case an important part.
Man can with difficulty maintain senses quite out of key with the
stimuli furnished by the outer world. They would then be useless
burdens to his organism. On the other side, even artificial structures
must be somehow geometrical or proportional, because only such
structures hold physically together. Objects that are to be esteemed by
man must further possess or acquire some function in his economy;
otherwise they would not be noticed nor be so defined as to be
recognisable.