Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/678

660 or idiotic features to an expression full of liveliness and intelligence—there can be but one answer possible. Leaving out of consideration for the present all other elements of the involved and complex problem, we may conclude that beauty, from one point of view at least, consists for each species in the outward signs of specific adaptation to specific necessities.

On the other hand, beauty also consists from a different point of view of stimulation by a certain relatively fixed number of external stimulants—musical sound, brilliant light, analytic colors, curved shapes, symmetrical arrangements of form, etc.—which appear to act directly upon the nervous system. This is clearly the view which Mr. Darwin implicitly accepts, especially with regard to tone and color. The facts at which we have briefly glanced above respecting the aesthetic feelings in birds, and the beauty of the birds themselves, take for granted some such theory of the aesthetic faculty. How are we to find a reconciliation between this view and that of Mr. Herbert Spencer?

I believe the true clew has been given us by Mr. A. R. Wallace, in the able essays on "Color in Plants and Animals" which originally appeared in "Macmillan's Magazine," and were afterward reprinted in his work on "Tropical Nature." It is true that Mr. Wallace utterly rejects sexual selection as a vera causa, and substitutes for it several separate minor modifications of natural selection; yet it seems to me that a compromise between his view and the two other views of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer would more really represent the actual state of the case in nature. Or, to put it more correctly, the three ideas are not in reality contradictory or even opposite, but are rather different and complementary aspects of one and the same fundamental truth.

Beauty in the abstract and for all species, as it seems to me, consists of pleasurable stimulation of the higher sense-organs. Such pleasurable stimulation must, on the average of cases, be given rather by brilliancy than by dullness; rather by analytic colors than by confused hues; rather by curved or flowing forms than by angularity; rather by musical sounds than by mere noises. But beauty relatively to the particular species, and especially as regards the sexual relation, must be largely due to special inherited tastes, doubtless ingrained and physically registered in the nervous system, leading the animal to derive pleasure from the typically healthy and normal form of the opposite sex. For, if any individual possesses divergent tastes, they must either be for relatively unhealthy and typically defective forms, in which case they will tend to be promptly suppressed by natural selection; or for neutral or improved forms, in which case they will help to give rise to new varieties, ultimately culminating in separate species. Such divergent tastes seem to be shown in all large dominant families, such as the humming-birds, where specific variation and ornamentation