.

There is something, I think, peculiarly beautiful and instructive in
this unselfishness of the theoretic faculty, and in its abhorrence of
all utility which is based on the pain or destruction of any creature,
for in such ministering to each other as is consistent with the essence
and energy of both, it takes delight, as in the clothing of the rock by
the herbage, and the feeding of the herbage by the stream.

Sec. 6. Especially with respect to animals.

Sec. 7. And it is destroyed by evidences of mechanism.

But still more distinct evidence of its being indeed the expression of
happiness to which we look for our first pleasure in organic form, is
to be found in the way in which we regard the bodily frame of animals:
of which it is to be noted first, that there is not anything which
causes so intense and tormenting a sense of ugliness as any scar, wound,
monstrosity, or imperfection which seems inconsistent with the animal's
ease and health; and that although in vegetables, where there is no
immediate sense of pain, we are comparatively little hurt by
excrescences and irregularities, but are sometimes even delighted with
them, and fond of them, as children of the oak-apple, and sometimes look
upon them as more interesting than the uninjured conditions, as in the
gnarled and knotted trunks of trees; yet the slightest approach to
anything of the kind in animal form is regarded with intense horror,
merely from the sense of pain it conveys. And, in the second place, it
is to be noted that whenever we dissect the animal frame, or conceive it
as dissected, and substitute in our ideas the neatness of mechanical
contrivance for the pleasure of the animal; the moment we reduce
enjoyment to ingenuity, and volition to leverage, that instant all sense
of beauty disappears. Take, for instance, the action of the limb of the
ostrich, which is beautiful so long as we see it in its swift uplifting
along the desert sands, and trace in the tread of it her scorn of the
horse and his rider, but would infinitely lose of its impressiveness, if
we could see the spring ligament playing backwards and forwards in
alternate jerks over the tubercle at the hock joint. Take again the
action of the dorsal fin of the shark tribe. So long as we observe the
uniform energy of motion in the whole frame, the lash of the tail, bound
of body, and instantaneous lowering of the dorsal, to avoid the
resistance of the water as it turns, there is high sens