The most ancient of which it seems necessary to take any notice, is that which may be traced in. the Dialogues of Hatch—though we are very far from pretending that it is possible to give any intelligible or consistent account of its tenor. It should never be forgotten, however, that it is to this subtle and ingenious spirit, that we owe the suggestion, that it is Mind alone that is Beautiful ; and that, in perceiv ing Beauty, it only contemplates the shadow of its. own affections ;—a doctrine which, however•mysti cally unfolded in his writings, or however combined' with extravagant or absurd speculations, unques tionably carries in it the germ of all the tenth that. has since been revealed on the subject. By far the largest. dissertation, however, that this great philosopher has left upon the 'figure of Beauty, is to be found in the dialogue entitled the Greater Hippies, which is entirely devoted to that inquiry. We do not learn a great deal of the autborliewn op. Won, indeed, from this.performance ; for itli•ose at the dialogues which have been termed Anatreptic or confuting,—in which nothing is concluded in the affirmative, but a series of sophistical suggestions or hypotheses are successively exposed. The plan of it is to lead on Hippies, a shallow and confident sophist, to make a variety of dogmatical assertions as to the nature of Beauty, and then to make him retract and abandon them upon the statement of some obvious objections. Socrates and he agree at first in the notable proposition, " that Beauty is that by which all Beautiful things are Beautiful ;" and then, after a great number of suggestions, by far too childish and absurd to be worthy of any notice, such as, that the Beautiful may perad venture be gold, or a fine woman, or a handsome mare, they at last get to some suppositions, which show that almost all the theories that have since been propounded on this interesting subject, had oc curred thus early to the active and original mind of this keen and curious inquirer. Thus Socrates first suggests, that Beauty may consist in the Fitness or suitableness of any object to the place it occupies, and afterwards, more generally and directly, that it may consist in Utility,—a notion which is ultimately rejected, however, upon the subtle consideration that the useful is that which produces good, and that the producer and the product being necessarily differ ent, it would follow, upon that supposition, that beau ty could not be good, nor good beautiful. Finally, he suggests, that' Beauty may be the mere organic delight of the eye or the ear,—to which, after stating very slightly the objection, that it would be impos sible to account upon this ground for the Beauty of poetry or eloquence, he proceeds to rear up a more refined and elaborate refutation, upon such grounds as these :—If Beauty be the proper name of that which is naturally agreeable to the sight and hear ing, it is plain, that the objects to which it is ascrib ed must possess some common .and distinguishable • property, besides that of being agreeable, in conse quence of which, they are separated and set apart from objects that are agreeable to our other senses and faculties, and, at the same time, classed together under the common appellation of Beautiful.—Now, we are not only quite unable to discover what this property is, but it is manifest, that objects which make themselves known to the ear, can have no pro perty as such, in common with objects that make themselves known to the eye • it being impossible that an object which is beautiful by its colour, can be beautiful, from the same quality, with another which is beautiful by its sound. From all which it is inferred, that, as Beauty is admitted to be some thing real, it cannot be merely what is agreeable to the organs of sight or bearing.
There is no practical wisdom, we admit, in those fine drawn speculations ; nor any of that spirit of patient observation by which alone any sound view of such objects can ever be attained. There are also many marks of that singular incapacity to distinguish between what is absolutely puerile and silly, and is plausible, at least, and ingenious, which • may be reckoned among the characteristics of " the divine philosopher," and in some degree of all the philosophers of antiquity : But they show clearly enough subtle and abstract character of Greek speculation, and prove at how early a period, and to how great an extent, the inherent difficulties of the subject were felt, and produced their appropri ate effects.
There are some hints on these subjects in the. works of Xenophon, and some scattered observa tions in those of Cicero, who was the first, we be lieve, to observe, that the sense of Beauty is pecu liar to Man;—but nothing else, we believe, in classi cal antiquity, which requires to be analyzed or ex plained. It appears that St Augustin composed a large treatise on Beauty ; and it is to be lamented, that the speculations of that acute and ardent ge nius on such a subject have been lost. We disco ver, from incidental notices in other parts of his writings, that conceived the Beauty of all objects to depend on their Unity,—or on the perception of. that Principle or Design which fixed the relations of . their various parts, and presented them to the intel lect or imagination as one harmonious whole. It would not be fair to deal very strictly with- a theory with which we are so imperfectly acquainted : But it may be observed, that, while the author is so far in the right as to make Beauty consist in a relation to mind, and not in any physical quality, he has taken far too narrow and circumscribed a view of the mat ter, and one which seems almost exclusively appli cable to works of human art ; it being plain enough, we think, that •a beautiful landscape, or a beautiful horse, has no more unity, and no more traces of de sign, than one which is not beautiful.
We do not pretend to know what the Schoolmen taught upon this subject during the dark ages ; but the discussion does not seem to have been resumed for long after the revival of letters. The followers of Leibnitz were pleased to maintain, that Beauty consisted in Perfection ; but what constituted Per fection they did not attempt to define. M. Crouzas wrote a long essay, to show that Beauty depended' on these five elements, Variety, Unity, Regularity, Order, and Proportion ; and the. Pere Andre, a still longer one to prove, that, admitting these to be the true foundations of Beauty, it was still most import ant to consider, that the Beauty which results from them is either Essential, or Natural, or Artificial,— and that it may be greater or less, according as the characteristics of each of these classes are combined or set in opposition.
Among ourselves, we are not aware of any consi derable publication on the subject tiff the appear ance of Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics, in which a sort of rapturous Platonic doctrine is delivered as to the existence of a primitive and Supreme Good and Beauty, and of a certain internal sense, by which both Beauty and moral merit were distin guished. Addison published several ingenious pa-1 pers in The Spectator, on the pleasures of the ima gination, and was the first, we believe, who referred them to the specific sources of Beauty, Sublimity, and Novelty. He did not enter much, however, into the metaphysical discussion of the nature of Beauty itself; and the first philosophical treatise of note that appeared on the subject, may be said to have been the Inquiry of Dr Hucheson, first pub lished, we believe, in 1725.
In this work, the notion of a peculiar internal sense, by which we are made sensible of the exist ence of Beauty, is very boldly promulgated, and maintained by many ingenious arguments: Yet no thing, we conceive, can be more extravagant than such a proposition ; and nothing but the radical faults of the other parts of the hypothesis could possibly have driven the learned author to its adoption. Even after the existence of this sixth sense was assumed, he felt that it was still necessary that he should ex plain what were the qualities by which it was grati fied; and these, he was pleased to allege, were nothing but the combinations of Variety with Uniformity ; all objects, as he has himself expressed it, which are ' equally Uniform, being Beautiful in proportion to their Variety,—and all objects equally various being Beautiful in proportion to their Uniformity. Now, not to insist upon the obvious and radical objection that this is not true in fact, as to flowers, landscapes, or indeed of any thing but architecture, if it be true of that,—it could not fail to strike the ingenious author that these qualities of Uniformity and Variety were not of themselves agreeable to any of our known senses or faculties, except when considered as sym bols of Utility or Design, and therefore could not intelligibly account for ;he very lively emotions which we often experience from the perception of Beauty, where the notion of design or utility was not at all suggested. He was constrained, therefore, either to abandon this view of the nature of Beauty alto gether, or to imagine a new sense or faculty, whose characteristic and description it should be to receive delight from the combinations of Uniformity and Variety, without any consideration of their being significant of things agreeable to our other faculties ; and this being accomplished by the, mere force of the assumption and the definition, there was no room for farther dispute or difficulty in the matter.
Some of Hucheson'a followers, such as Gerard and others, who were a little startled at the notion of a separate faculty, and yet wished to retain the doctrine of Beauty depending on Variety and Uniformity, endeavoured, accordingly, to show that these quali ties were naturally agreeable to the mind, and were recommended by considerations arising from its most familiar properties. Uniformity or Simplicity, it is said, renders our conception of objects easy, and saves the mind from all fatigue and distraction in the consideration of them; whilst Variety, if circumscrib ed and limited by an ultimate uniformity, gives it a pleasing exercise and excitement, and keeps its ener gies in a state of pleasurable activity. Now, this appears to us to be mere trifling. The varied and lively emotions which we receive from the percep tion of Beauty, obviously have no sort of resem .blance to the pleasure of moderate intellectual exer tion; nor can anything be conceived more utterly dissimilar than the gratification we have in gazing on the form of a lovely woman, and the satisfaction we receive from working an easy problem in arith metic or geometry. If a triangle is mote beautiful than a regular polygon, as those authors maintain, merely because its figure is more easily comprehend ed, the number four should be more beautiful than the number three hundred and twenty-seven, and the form of a gibbet far more agreeable than that