BEAUTY, in its most general sense, denotes, any quality, or assemblage of qualities, in objects, which arc calculatec•to excite in the observer, emotions of delight and complacency. In a more limited and appropriate sense, beauty is restricted to those qua lities of objects which excite.in the mind a species of tenderness, fondness, or affection. The great lati titude with which the term has been employed, in volves the analysis of the beautiful in a considerable' degree of difficulty and obscurity. Thus we not only speak of a beautiful woman, and a beautiful flower, in which cases we employ the term in its most appro priate sense ; but we speak also of a beautiful build ing, a beautiful piece of music, a beautiful poem, a beautiful machine, a beautiful theorem in geometry, or a beautiful trait of human conduct.; examples of excellence involving qualities of extremely different kinds. A similar ambiguity exists in the terms sig.-, nificant of beauty in every, known language.• Greek To 74gX0Y, or the epithet Lea/di/id, was as fie quently applied to moral excellence as to the merely pleasing in objects ; and in Latin, pulehruni had the same ambiguity, as we learn from its being so com monly conjoined with honestutn.
In the observations which are to follow on this subject, we shall first inquire into the nature of these qualities which constitute beauty strictly so called; and then we may perhaps be able to ascertain the origin of that analogical application of the term, by which it is made to characterise a class of objects so extreme ly different from each other as those to which it is applied in the vague and ordinary usage of language. Beauty, strictly so called, we have said, denotes those qualities of objects which excite in the mind a species of affection or tenderness. Even in this limited sense of the word, it comprehends qualities which are ex ceedingly various and diversified. There is not only a beauty of forms and of colours, but there is a beau. ty of motions, and a beauty of sounds. There is a beauty too, it may be said, though doubtless of a more debased'and sensual kind,,which is addressed to the smell, the taste, and the touch. And there is not only a physical beauty, or a beauty in the quali ties of material objects, but there is a moral beauty; a beauty in the sentiments and dispositions of the hu man mina, by which affection is more powerfully roused than by .any combination of merely physical properties.
Much ingenuity has been exercised in the attempt to determine in what all these various qualities agree, or to assign the true theory of the beautifid ; a sub no doubt of considerable curiosity and interest...
he ancients, indeed, have left us very little explicit. on the philosophy of beauty. Plato has two dia logues on the beautiful ; but in neither of them does he attempt to explain in what it consists, unless by mentioning in general, symmetry as. its constituent qualities. Cicero, in the same indefi nite manner, speaks of order and correspondence of . parts as qualities-of beautiful objects; but he gives no illustration of his doctrine, nor does he represent it as by any means complete.
Before descending to the systems of the moderns, we may mention the theory of the venerable father Augustine, whO, in the fourth book of his Confes, sions, speaks of two Or three- treatises which he had written, in his younger days, concerning beauty; but • some way or other he had lost them, and he does not appear anxious that they' should ever be re covered. According to his view of the subject, which may be collected from other parts of his wri tings, beauty consists in unity_ of parts, or in perfect symmetry.* " And," adds the father, " because all bodies upon earth are made of ,various elements, we are not here to look for perfect beauty, which is to be found alone in the. one all perfect Supreme Being. But surely a rose has much less unity of parts than a ground worm ; although the former is beautiful, the latter altogether disgusting." The theory which resolves beauty into a certain symmetry and determinate proportion of parts, and which seems to have been that entertained by the Greek and Roman philosophers, has had many stre nuous advocates among the moderns, particularly in the class of artists, who seem to have thought that the constituent elements of the beautiful might be with certainty detected, and even measured in the • most approved models of statuary and painting. The insufficiency of this theory has been very satisfactori ly proved by Mr Burke, who is very decidedly of opinion, that " beauty is no idea belonging to men suration ; nor has it any thing to do with calculation and geometry." To establish this opinion, he exa mines beauty, as it appears in vegetables, in the in ferior animals, and in man; and in all these cases he finds that there are no certain measures on which the . beautiful can be said, in any degree, to depend.