CHAPTER XV - GENERAL CONCLUSIONS RESPECTING THE THEORETIC FACULTY

Summary

There are no sources of the emotion of Beauty more than those found in things visible

Of the sources of beauty open to us in the visible world, we have now obtained a view which, however scanty in its detail, is yet general in its range. Of no other sources than these visible ones, can we, by any effort in our present condition of existence, conceive. For what revelations have been made to humanity inspired, or caught up to heaven, of things to the heavenly region belonging, have been either by unspeakable words, or else by their very nature incommunicable, except in types and shadows; and ineffable by words belonging to earth, for, of things different from the visible, words appropriated to the visible can convey no image. How different from earthly gold the clear pavement of the city might have seemed to the eyes of St. John, we of unreceived sight cannot know; neither of that strange jasper and sardine can we conceive the likeness which He assumed that sat on the throne above the crystal sea; neither what seeming that was of slaying that the Root of David bore in the midst of the elders; neither what change it was upon the form of the fourth of them that walked in the furnace of Dura, that even the wrath of Idolatry knew for the likeness of the Son of God.