riety, that variety which is
necessary to secure and extend unity, (for the greater the number of
objects, which by their differences become members of one another, the
more extended and sublime is their unity,) which is rightly agreeable,
and so I name not variety as essential to beauty, because it is only so
in a secondary and casual sense.[16]

Sec. 6. Change, and its influence on beauty.

Sec. 7. The love of change. How morbid and evil.

Of the love of change as a principle of human nature, and the
pleasantness of variety resulting from it, something has already been
said, (Ch. IV. Sec. 4,) only as there I was opposing the idea that our
being familiar with objects was the cause of our delight in them, so
here, I have to oppose the contrary position, that their strangeness is
the cause of it. For neither familiarity nor strangeness have more
operation on, or connection with, impressions of one sense than of
another, and they have less power over the impressions of sense
generally, than over the intellect in its joyful accepting of fresh
knowledge, and dull contemplation of that it has long possessed. Only in
their operation on the senses they act contrarily at different times, as
for instance the newness of a dress or of some kind of unaccustomed food
may make it for a time delightful, but as the novelty passes away, so
also may the delight, yielding to disgust or indifference, which in
their turn, as custom begins to operate, may pass into affection and
craving, and that which was first a luxury, and then a matter of
indifference, becomes a necessity:[17] whereas in subjects of the
intellect, the chief delight they convey is dependent upon their being
newly and vividly comprehended, and as they become subjects of
contemplation they lose their value, and become tasteless and
unregarded, except as instruments for the reaching of others, only that
though they sink down into the shadowy, effectless, heap of things
indifferent, which we pack, and crush down, and stand upon, to reach
things new, they sparkle afresh at intervals as we stir them by throwing
a new stone into the heap, and letting the newly admitted lights play
upon them. And both in subjects of the intellect and the senses it is to
be remembered, that the love of change is a weakness and imperfection of
our nature, and implies in it the state of probation, and that it is to
teach us that things about us here are not meant for our continual
possession or