Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/222

 208 w. R. SCOTT : than it had received from the former. The harmonious and symmetrical system of Shaftesbury needs to be both explained and expanded to show how it can apply to both natural and moral Beauty. Hutcheson, by his express division of the Inner sense into an ^Esthetic and Moral Sense, is enabled to give a definition applicable, as he thought, to Natural and Artistic Beauty namely, the presence of " Uniformity amidst variety ". l Arbuckle rather shelves the question by saying that the " inquiry wherein Beauty properly consists is foreign to the present design". 2 Partly following Shaftesbury, 3 he makes a start from Bacon's reduction of Beauty to three characteristics Colour, flavour and motion, which he inter- prets, in personal beauty, as a fine complexion, regularity of feature, " and that Je ne sgay quoi which we commonly call a good air". 4 Of these the latter is the most important, as being the play of feature, which is the symbol of " that motion of mind which is necessary to communicate an agreeable motion to the face and spread itself in those thousand nameless graces and amiable dimples that strike the beholder with joy and delight ". 5 Thus, in the outer world, Beauty consists of Colour, order or arrangement, and movement, while in the inner world of art and conduct there is an energy which realises in action a product that shows similar or corresponding traces of order in relation to its environment. Elsewhere, Arbuckle seems to incline to the theory of Leibnitz that this order arises out of minute differ- ences, for each of which there is a sufficient reason, and hence the ground of beauty would be a rational appreciation of the harmony of the universe, consisting of a symmetry composed of infinite diversities. 6 This view, however, is mentioned incidentally, and is not developed. The manner in which Beauty is apprehended. Arbuckle always uses the greatest reserve in speaking of the way Beauty is appreciated. As already mentioned, he never uses the ex- pression "moral sense" in reference to Shaftesbury 's moral beauty, and as a rule the term " sense " occurs very rarely in his work. He frequently speaks of "taste," but rather in a strictly aesthetic signification than as an exact equivalent 1 Inquiry Concerning Beauty, 2-3. 2 Hibernicus' s Letters, i., p. 40. 3 Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue, i., part ii., 3. 4 Ibid., I, p. 23. 5 Ibid., p. 24. 6 Ibid., ii., p. 340. It may be noted that Hutcheson (Inquiry Con- cerning Beauty, 3) instances this theory of Leibnitz as a case of a per- version of the sense of Beauty what he calls fantastic beauty.