Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/536

 520 E. H. DONKIN: nature and the original arrangement of the conditions of the universe. "Fire destroys life " represents a law or laws of nature. " That friend of mine was burnt to death " is felt to be a fact that traces its ancestry not merely to laws of nature, but to the particular arrangement in which those laws were first set going relatively to each other. It is true that we cannot but believe that this relative arrangement, or the actual form that the universe has taken, was caused : that is, arose in obedience to law. It is also true that we must believe that all natural laws arose out of, and are forms of, that one ultimate cause or law. But at the same time our minds cannot but draw a marked distinction between the array of " natural " laws, or causes, and the one ultimate law, or cause. We conceive of the former as in some sense comprehensible ; of the latter as, to our human intellects, incomprehensible. We can believe that " arsenic poisons " represents a law, cause, or identity, which we could grasp : we can imagine that with senses indefinitely extended we should perceive that at the heart of " arsenic poisons " there lurks a palpable truism. But " the universe is thus " repre- sents an ultimate law, cause, or identity that transcends our powers of comprehension. Now under which head are we to place those concur- rences which are the necessary conditions for aesthetic con- sciousness ? are the main factors in them natural laws, or the one ultimate law which arranged the primary conditions as it did '? I seem to feel a far closer kinship between the concur- rences that yield aesthetic consciousness, and the primary arrangement of the universe, than between these concur- rences and natural laws. I do not think that this is so obviously true, though it is true, in the case of natural beauty : Wordsworth's " thoughts that lie too deep for tears " do not come to every one at the sight of the meanest flower that blows. But it seems far more evidently true of the beauty of art. Art constantly selects features to group together which visibly lie too far apart for any chain of natural causation to link them all together ; to get a com- mon ancestor you must go back to the original inscrutable constitution of the universe. This may indeed be said of any group of phenomena, whether chosen by art or not. But the tendency of art is to leave natural causes in their native confusion and obscurity, and to thrust on the spec- tator's attention the one great absorbing topic, the mys- terious unknown meaning of, or reason for, the All being as it is. Take Tennyson's " Break, break, break " as a whole,