Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/535

SUGGESTIONS ON AESTHETIC. 519 similarly may we say that the ideally glorious unheard tone of which we dream that the oboe's timbre is an inadequate representative, persists onwards in spite of antagonism into the defective actual tone ; and that the one unknown quality persists onwards through the features of the unsymmetrical face in spite of their unsymmetry, that is, resistance to one- ness of meaning ? My aim, it will be seen, is to bring every kind of beauty of expressiveness under the very same formula, sameness in difference, which applies to strictly formal beauty. The beauty of musical harmonies seems to me on analysis to lead to the same result ; but the subject would perhaps be better treated by itself. The aesthetic quality of an apt quotation the rare literary flavour it disseminates seems to be in reality another case of the same kind. The noble effect of Burke's quotations from Horace seems due to our sense of the persistence of quality from the one distant sphere right on to the other, in spite of the remoteness the sphere of modern political life, and the sphere of ancient bygone poetry. I wish now to indicate another line of thought that seems worth following out in connexion with the above. Take these two philosophical topics, " aesthetic " and "cause". How do they stand in relation to one another if there is a relation between them ? There is one marked distinction that disunites the two. There can be no consciousness, and therefore no aesthetic consciousness, without concurrences parallel, co-existent modes of consciousness. ^Esthetic is rooted in duality. On the other hand, cause is rooted in identity, that is unity : unity passing on into different forms indeed, but, qua cause, absolutely one. The genuine causal thread of antecedent . . consequent, as we must conceive it, must be infinitely thin ; nay, it must be infinitely short ; a mere atom ; not admitting of variety. Hence, in itself, it could not admit of conscious- ness. What enables consciousness, or Ego, to awake is some concurrent datum introduced alongside of the first. Esthetic then may be said to be an affair of concurrences and not of causal processions or sequences. It is true that line follows line in poetry ; but line does not cause line ; and to the aesthetic consciousness the impression left by the previous line must be concurrent with the impression made by the next. Now this contrast which I have attempted to indicate between causal sequences, and concurrences, in reality coin- cides with that which may be drawn between the laws of