It thrills the nerves,
it stimulates the intellect, but it is more than a thrill, and other
than the intellect; it is treatment, but who can give laws for it? The
answer which explained the sense of beauty that we feel in works of
art would go straight to the revelation of the essence of beauty. All
that aesthetic teachers tell us is, that certain lines and colours and
arrangements are harmonious, and the philosopher fails in telling us
why they are harmonious. Does Hegel? Even if we are told there is an
Idea in us which is also an Idea in Nature, and, therefore, we can
understand the Idea, because We are It, does that throw light on what
the Idea really is? We are the human side of nature, and have the same
human difficulty as before in interpreting the Idea. Yet there is one
philosopher, as many readers must have felt, who has brought us nearer
to the interpretation of the artistic attitude, than any other, and
this is Schopenhauer on what we may call his mystical side in his book
of "Will and Idea." Perhaps most philosophers have erred in too rigid
an exclusion of feeling and imagination. It is impossible to help
feeling that his philosophy is largely moulded and created by his
feeling for art--and by his oriental mysticism.
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