BEAUTY CONSISTS IN KINSHIP TO THE SOUL.
2. Returning to our first consideration, we shall examine the nature of the element of beauty in bodies. It is something perceivable at the very first glance, something which the soul recognizes as kindred, and sympathetic to her own nature, which she welcomes and assimilates. But as soon as she meets an ugly object, she recoils, repudiates it, and rejects it as some thing foreign, towards which her real nature feels antipathy. That is the reason why the soul, being such as it is, namely, of an essence superior to all other beings, when she perceives an object kindred to her own nature, or which reveals only some traces of it, rejoices, is transported, compares this object with her own nature, thinks of herself, and of her intimate being as it would be impossible to fail to perceive this re semblance.
BEAUTY CONSISTS IN PARTICIPATION IN A FORM.
How can both sensible and intelligible objects be beautiful? Because, as we said, sensible objects participate in a form. While a shapeless object, by nature capable of receiving shape (physical) and form (intelligible), remains without reason or form, it is ugly. That which remains completely foreign to all divine reason (a reason proceeding from the universal Soul), is absolute ugliness. Any object should be considered ugly which is not entirely molded by informing reason, the matter, not being able to receive perfectly the form (which the Soul gives it). On joining matter, form co-ordinates the different parts which are to com pose unity, combines them, and by their harmony produces something which is a unit. Since (form) is one, that which it fashions will also have to be one, as far as a composite object can be one. When such an object has arrived at unity, beauty resides in it, and it communicates itself to the parts as well as to the whole. When it meets a whole, the parts of which are perfectly similar, it interpenetrates it evenly. Thus it would show itself now in an entire building, then in a single stone, later in art-products as well as in the works of nature. Thus bodies become beautiful by communion with (or, participation in) a reason descending upon it from the divine (universal Soul).