Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/21



Human beauty is something which is perennially celebrated in poetry, in song, in romance, and in the petrified conception of the sculptor, but less frequently considered in the cold analysis of science. We are usually content to leave the topic to the artist and the lover, as one of the interesting and thrilling, but nonessential, matters of life. I wish to suggest a different conception of beauty: a conception of beauty as something which, whatever its importance for the individual, is for the race and for civilization of such profound importance that no other fundamental consideration of human welfare and progress can be divorced from it. I shall not touch upon the theme with the golden fingers of the artist, but with the unemotional digits of the psychologist. To some, without doubt, this procedure will seem as sacrilegious as the piercing of the anatomist’s knife into the dead human form; but where the