ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Next he adds a further consideration, that of Nature's purposiveness, her adaptation of means to ends. To the student of Nature the loose overhanging skin of the lion's forehead, so forbidding to a child's eye, is evidence of purpose. It assists, so Aristotle had surmised, the lion's vision; it exhibits the adaptation of structure to end. The grown man delights in this mark of purpose in the handiwork of the artist Nature as much as he had once enjoyed the evidence of the human artist's skill in the portraiture of these natural features. Thus, very simply, Marcus passes from the recognition of external utility to the principle of immanent purpose.
The close of the chapter is brief, compressed almost to enigma. He recurs to the problem of senile decay and death. In the white hair and wrinkled face of age he detects a purpose, and therefore a beauty, even a bloom as of autumn; a supervenient charm like the complexion of adolescence, when life is at its spring time. The comparison of age to autumn, of youth to spring dictates a final reflection. To one who has kept watch on Nature youthful beauty will take a 'sober colouring', will excite no passion, but only awaken the admiration which Nature's handiwork inspires.
The connexion, if not the identification, of the pleasure aroused by beauty with the pleasure in the recognition of purpose or design goes back to Socrates. Xenophon[1] reports Socrates as saying to Aristippus, the Hedonist, that all good and beautiful things are such in reference to the purposes which they serve. The argument before us, however, seems to be directly connected with Aristotle's eloquent defence of the study of the whole animal kingdom. 'If seen through the eyes of science,' he says, 'they are so fashioned by Nature as to give infinite pleasure to one who is enabled to recognize their reasons, the natural philosopher, in fact. A strange paradox, to enjoy the sight of pictures of them because we see at the same time the human art which fashioned those pictures, and yet not to delight even more in the contemplation of Nature's living works, when we are enabled to see the reason why. And so we must not feel a child's distaste in seeing animals which have little honour, for in all natural things . . . we find the evidence of purpose in an eminent degree, and the purpose for which they are constructed or created occupies ground which
- ↑ Mem. iii. 8. 4–7.
