that complete death which would be identical with never having been born. Though all things pass away, yet none can die. The representations which we have forgotten, also persist in some way in our spirit, for without them we could not explain acquired habits and capacities. Thus, the strength of life lies in this apparent forgetting one forgets what has been absorbed and what life has superseded.

But many other things, many other representations, are still efficacious elements in the actual processes of our spirit; and it is incumbent on us not to forget them, or to be capable of recalling them when necessity demands them. The will is always vigilant in this work of preservation, for it aims at preserving (so to say) the greater and more fundamental part of all our riches. Certainly its vigilance is not always sufficient. Memory, we know, leaves or betrays us in various ways. For this very

reason, the vigilant will excogitates expedients, which help memory in its weakness, and are its aids.

of aids

We have already explained how these aids are The production possible. Expressions or representations are, at to memory. the same time, practical facts, which are also called physical facts, in so far as to the physical

belongs the task of classifying them and reducing them to types. Now it is clear, that if we can succeed in making those facts in some way permanent, it will always be possible (other conditions remaining equal) to reproduce in us, by perceiving it, the already produced expression or intuition.

e;

If that in which the practical concomitant acts, or (to use physical terms) the movements have been isolated and made in some sort permanent, be called the object or physical stimulus, and if it be designated by the letter then the process of reproduction will take place in the following order: e, the physical stimulus ; d-b, perceptions of physical facts (sounds, tones, mimic, combinations of lines and colours, etc.), which form together the aesthetic synthesis, already produced; c, the hedonistic

paniment, which is also reproduced.

accom

And what are those combinations of words which are called poetry, prose, poems, novels, romances, tragedies or comedies, but physical stimulants of reproduction (the e stage); what

are those combinations of sound which are called operas, symphonies, sonatas; and what those of lines and of colours, which are called pictures, statues, architecture? The spiritual energy of

memory, with the assistance of those physical facts above mentioned, makes possible the preservation and the reproduction of the intuitions produced, often so laboriously, by ourselves and by others. If the physiological organism, and with it memory, become weakened; if the monuments of art be destroyed; then all the aesthetic wealth, the fruit of the labours of many generations, becomes lessened and rapidly disappears.

Monuments of art, which are the stimulants The physically beautiful. of æsthetic reproduction, are called beautiful things or the physically beautiful. This combination of words constitutes a verbal paradox, because the beautiful is not a physical fact; it does not belong to things, but to the activity of man, to spiritual energy. But henceforth it is clear through what wanderings and what abbreviations, physical things and facts, which are simply aids to the reproduction of the beautiful, end by being called, elliptically, beautiful things and physically beautiful. And now that we have made the existence of this ellipse clear, we shall ourselves make use of it without hesitation.

form: another

The intervention of the physically beautiful Content and serves to explain another meaning of the words meaning. content and form, as employed by æstheticians.

Natural and artificial beauty.

Some call "content" the internal fact or expression (which is for us already form), and they call "form" the marble, the colours, the rhythm, the sounds (for us form no longer); thus they look upon the physical fact as the form, which may or may not be joined to the content. This serves to explain another aspect of what is called æsthetic ugliness. He who has nothing definite to express may try to hide his internal emptiness with a flood of words, with sounding verse, with deafening polyphony, with painting that dazzles the eye, or by collocating great architectonic masses, which arrest and disturb, although, at bottom, they convey nothing. Ugliness, then, is the arbitrary, the charlatanesque; and, in reality, if the practical will do not intervene in the theoretic function, there may be absence of beauty, but never effective presence of the ugly.

Physical beauty is wont to be divided into natural and artificial beauty. Thus we reach one of the facts, which has given great labour to thinkers the beautiful in nature. These words often designate simply facts of practical pleasure. He alludes to nothing æsthetic who calls a landscape beautiful where the eye rests upon verdure, where bodily motion is easy, and where the warm sun-ray envelops and caresses the limbs.

But

it is nevertheless indubitable, that on other occasions the adjective "beautiful," applied to objects and scenes existing in nature, has a completely æsthetic signification.

It has been observed, that in order to enjoy natural objects æsthetically, we should withdraw them from their external and historical reality, and separate their simple appearance or origin from existence; that if we contemplate a landscape with our head between our legs, in such a way as to remove ourselves from our wonted relations with it, the landscape appears as an ideal spectacle; that nature is beautiful only for him who contemplates her with the eye of the artist; that zoologists and botanists do not recognize beautiful animals and flowers; that natural beauty is discovered (and examples of discovery are the points of view, pointed out by men of taste and imagination, and to which more or less æsthetic travellers and excursionists afterwards have recourse in pilgrimage, whence a more or less collective suggestion); that, without the aid of the imagination, no part of nature is beautiful, and that with such aid the same natural object or fact is now expressive, according to the disposition of the soul, now insignificant, now expressive of one definite

M