Confronted now with the opportunity to revise the text again, I find
myself in the position of a surgeon who feels that the operation he
is called upon to perform may perhaps harm more than it can help.
Prudence therefore prevails over my passion for dissection: warned by
eminent examples, I fear that any injection of my more mature and less
cocksure consciousness into this book might impair its unity--that I
"never could recapture the first fine careless rapture."

The text stands therefore as originally published save for a few
verbal changes, and whatever reservations I have about it shall
be stated in this preface. These are not many nor important: _The
Beautiful Necessity_ contains nothing that I need repudiate or care to
contradict.

Its thesis, briefly stated, is that art in all its manifestations is
an expression of the cosmic life, and that its symbols constitute a
language by means of which this life is published and represented. Art
is at all times subject to the _Beautiful Necessity_ of proclaiming
the _world order_.

In attempting to develop this thesis it was not necessary (nor as
I now think, desirable) to link it up in so definite a manner with
theosophy. The individual consciousness is colored by the particular
medium through which it receives truth, and for me that medium was
theosophy. Though the book might gain a more unprejudiced hearing,
and from a larger audience, by the removal of the theosophic
"color-screen," it shall remain, for its removal now might seem to
imply a loss of faith in the fundamental tenets of theosophy, and such
an implication would not be true.