creative activity, the production of beauty is not directly willed. So Krause says, 'If Spirit freely rules the form of what is individual according to the Idea, beauty arises of itself as by a beneficent necessity' (p. 72). The question why such and such forms express spiritual beauty is not much discussed; the answer because they are symmetrical' has been dismissed. The soul recognises in certain forms a meaning which it understands and loves; the sensuous forms have a natural affinity to certain ideas. Plotinus believed that beautiful forms in this world have a real resemblance to their prototypes in the spiritual world. Earth is a good copy of heaven; earthly beauty, we must remember, is the creation of Soul, not a property of matter. But the beauty which we find in objects is not put into them by the individual observer. All beauty is the work of Soul, but not of the individual Soul which admires it. The individual Soul can only appreciate what is akin to itself; but it is not the perceiving mind of the individual which gives to inert matter a meaning by impressing 'form' upon it. That would be to make the individual Soul the creator of the world, which Plotinus says we must not do. And yet the individual Soul is never wholly separated from the universal Soul; and we must further remember that no perception, not even the perception of external objects, is mere apprehension. Something is always done or made in the act of perception. The Soul, in contemplating Beauty, is identifying itself with the formative activity of its own higher principle.

The First Chapter of the Sixth Ennead contains some new ideas which are not in Plato and Aristotle. Those who identify Beauty with symmetry regard the whole only as beautiful; the parts can be beautiful only in relation to the whole. But Beauty cannot result from a collection of unbeautiful things; if the whole is beautiful, the parts also must be beautiful. In the Eighth Chapter of the Fifth Ennead he says that 'everything is beautiful in its own true Being.' The same passage

develops the curious notion of the supreme holiness and beauty of light. Everything shines yonder.' Much more important is the argument by which Plotinus finds room for Art in the realm of the beautiful. The artist realises the beautiful in proportion as his work is real. The true artist does not copy nature. Here he agrees with Philostratus, who in an epoch-making passage says that great works of art are produced not by imitation (the Aristotelian μίμησις), but by imagination (φαντασία), 'a wiser creator than imagination; for imitation copies what it has seen, imagination what it has not seen.' The true artist fixes his eyes on the archetypal Logoi, and tries to draw inspiration from the spiritual power which created the forms of bodily beauty. Art, therefore, is a mode of contemplation, which creates because it must. This is a real advance upon Plato and Aristotle. Plotinus does not, like Schopenhauer, arrange the arts in an ascending scale-sculpture, painting, poetry, music; music being the highest because it works with the most ethereal medium; but this is genuine Platonism. There are said to be some musicians who prefer reading the score to hearing it played. If such men exist, they are ultra-Platonists.

What would Plotinus have said to Hegel's1 opinion that we have left behind the stage of culture in which art is the highest means by which we apprehend the Divine? We can no longer adore images, and art no longer satisfies our religious instincts. Perhaps this change is not so universal as Hegel thought; but Plotinus would have seen nothing unexpected in it. By emphasising the beauty of noble actions, Plotinus agrees with Kant and Lotze that beauty consists, partly at least, in harmony with a purpose. Lotze even suggests that it arises in the conflict between what is and what ought to be; but this is not Platonic. It is unquestionable that our age does not naturally express itself in beautiful forms. The self-consciousness of modern architecture.

1 Hegel, Works, Vol. 10, Part 1.

illustrates well the doctrine of Plotinus that we spoil our creations by thinking too much about them. But it would be rash to assume that a time will never come when we shall again create beautiful things without knowing why they are beautiful. The ugliness of our civilisation can hardly be set down to the fact that we have advanced beyond the artistic mode of self-expression. Plotinus is not very happy in his treatment of ugliness. Ugliness is not, as he supposes, absence of form; it is false form. The ugliest thing in nature, a human face distorted by vile passions, revolts us because the evil principle seems there to have set its mark on what was meant to bear the image of God. Ugliness is dirt in the wrong place.' This is in effect what Plotinus says when he tells us that all virtue is purification; but he never admits that there can be 'defilement of the flesh and spirit,' though all real ugliness consists not in the incrustation of incorporeal purity by something alien to itself, but in indications that the Soul itself has been stained and perverted. There is nothing repulsive in the sight of a marble statue half-covered with mud, or in a fine picture blackened with dirt and smoke; yet this is the type of ugliness which Plotinus gives us in his theory of evil. While we sympathise with his determination to make no compromise with metaphysical dualism, we cannot help feeling that his optimistic view of the world causes him to 'heal slightly' the wounds of humanity, in æsthetics as in morals.

But there is deep truth in this philosophy of the Beautiful. We cannot see real beauty while we are wrapped up in our petty personal interests. These are the muddy vesture of decay, of which we must rid ourselves. Art is the wide world's memory of things, and beauty is the universal and spiritual making itself known sensuously, as Hegel says. Esthetic pleasure is in truth the pleasure of recognition and consequent liberation. The soul sees the reflection of its own best self; and forthwith enters into a larger life. This is effected by

recognising some of its hidden sympathies in nature. Very much of the pleasure which we find in poetry and painting arises from brilliant translations of an idea from one language to another, showing links between diverse orders of being, symbols of the unseen which are no arbitrary types, or evidences of the fundamental truth about creation, that the universal Soul made the world in the likeness of its own principle, Spirit. Ultimately all is the self-revelation of the One and the Good.

Among later writers on æsthetics, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann are all indebted to Plotinus. So is Goethe, who regards the unity of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good as the absolute ground of all Being. Shaftesbury, at the end of the seventeenth century, was a kindred spirit. He finds that there are three orders or degrees of beauty-' first, the dead forms, which have no forming power, no action, or intelligence. Next, the forms which form; that is, which have intelligence, action, and operation. Thirdly, that order of beauty which forms not only such as we call mere forms, but even the forms which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in Matter, and can show lifeless bodies brought into form, and fashioned by our own hands; but that which fashions even minds themselves contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds, and is consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty. Therefore whatever beauty appears in our second order of forms, or whatever is derived or produced from thence, all this is eminently, principally, and originally in this last order of supreme and sovereign beauty. Thus architecture, music, and all which is of human invention, resolves itself into this last order.'1

It is not easy to find much similarity to Plotinus in the aesthetic theory of Croce, which is just now attracting much attention. He holds that beauty does not belong

1 Shaftesbury, Moralists, Part 3, Sect. 2.

to things; it is not a psychic fact, it belongs to man's activity, to spiritual energy. Esthetic activity is imaginative and concrete intuition, as opposed to the logical and general conception. It belongs to the Will, and its manifestations are Soul-states-passion, sentiment, personality. These are found in every art and determine its lyrical character.' Art is expression. Croce insists rightly that we cannot appreciate a work of art without, in a sense, reproducing the work of the artist in ourselves.