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The Psychology of Beauty by Ethel Dench Puffer Howes
page 41 of 236 (17%)
completely experienced; it should be realized in the subject
of the aesthetic experience, the lover of beauty. The
beautiful object would be not that which should show in
outline form, or remind of, this Unity of the World, but
which should create for the subject the moment of self-
completeness; which should inform the aesthetic subject with
that unity and self-completeness which are the "forms of
reflection" of the Infinite. The subject should be not a
mirror of perfection, but a state of perfection. Only in
this sense does the concept of reconciliation come to its
full meaning. Not because I see freedom, but because I am
free; not because I think of God, or the Infinite, or the
one, but because I am for the moment complete, at the
highest point of energy and unity, does the aesthetic
experience constitute such a reconciliation.

Not because I behold the Infinite, but because I have, myself,
a moment of perfection. Herein it is that our theory constitutes
a complete contradiction to all "expression" or "significant"
theories of the Beautiful, and does away with the necessity those
theories are under of reading sermons into stones. The yellow
primrose needs not to remind us of the harmony of the universe,
or to have ulterior significance whatever, if it gives by its
own direct simple stimulation a moment of Unity and Self-
completeness. That immediate experience indeed contains in
itself the "form of reflection" of the Absolute, and it is
through this that we so often pass, in the enjoyment of Beauty,
to the thought of the divine. But that thought is a corollary,
a secondary effect, not an essential part of the aesthetic
moment. There is a wonderful bit of unconscious aesthetics in
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