Full and sincere assent to your declaration that the statue is very
beautiful presupposes a high ideal in the mind; that is, a lofty
pre-attained idea of what is manly beauty. But after all, the want of
unanimity of assent to a moral or an æsthetic position, does it not
come from the difficulty and subtlety of the idea to be pre-attained?
Assent even to an intellectual proposition, does not it too presuppose
an ideal in the mind of him who assents? When you show by visible
measurement that the statue is eight feet high, whoever understands
what you mean must have already in his head the idea of what one foot
is; that is, he must carry within him an ideal. No tittle of
information, not the slightest accession of knowledge, will you derive
from the measurement even of the area of a hall or of the cubic
contents of a block, unless you bring with you in your mind an idea,
an ideal, of what is a superficial or a cubic square foot.

Attempts to give a notion of what the beautiful is, by
enumerating some of the physical conditions that are found to be
present in artistic figures or persons distinguished for beauty, or
attempts to produce what shall be beautiful, by complying with these
conditions, come no nearer to the aim than do compounded mineral
waters to the briskness and flavor of a fresh draught from the
original spring. In the analysis there may be no flaw; the ingredients
are chemically identical in quality and proportion; but the nameless,
inimitable, inscrutable life is wanting: the mixing has been done by a
mechanical, not by a creative hand. Haydon says, "The curve of the
circle is excess, the straight line is deficiency, the ellipsis is the
degree between, and that curve, added to or united with proportion,
regulates the form and features of a perfect woman." Mr. D.R. Hay, in
a series of books, professes to have discovered the principles of
beauty in the law of harmonic ratio, without, however, "pretending,"