and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the
harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from
its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from
the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained
within the present, as the plant within the seed; and equality,
diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles
alone capable of affording the motives according to which the
will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is
social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment,
beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of
kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain
order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects
and the impressions represented by them, all expression being
subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us
dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an
inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our
view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its
forms.

In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain
rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they
observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the
melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series
of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain
order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic
representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive
an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense
of an approximation to this order has been called taste by modern
writers. Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which