2.10. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT.

What stupendous constructive mental and physical possibilities are there
to which I feel I am contributing, you may ask, when I feel that I
contribute to this greater Being; and at once I confess I become vague
and mystical. I do not wish to pass glibly over this point. I call your
attention to the fact that here I am mystical and arbitrary. I am what I
am, an individual in this present phase. I can see nothing of these
possibilities except that they will be in the nature of those
indefinable and overpowering gleams of promise in our world that we call
Beauty. Elsewhere (in my "Food of the Gods") I have tried to render my
sense of our human possibility by monstrous images; I have written of
those who will "stand on this earth as on a footstool and reach out
their hands among the stars." But that is mere rhetoric at best, a
straining image of unimaginable things. Things move to Power and Beauty;
I say that much and I have said all that I can say.

But what is Beauty, you ask, and what will Power do? And here I reach my
utmost point in the direction of what you are free to call the
rhapsodical and the incomprehensible. I will not even attempt to define
Beauty. I will not because I cannot. To me it is a final, quite
indefinable thing. Either you understand it or you do not. Every true
artist and many who are not artists know--they know there is something
that shows suddenly--it may be in music, it may be in painting, it may
be in the sunlight on a glacier or a shadow cast by a furnace or the
scent of a flower, it may be in the person or act of some fellow
creature, but it is right, it is commanding, it is, to use theological
language, the revelation of God.