Suchness

“ The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments—and even in love. The manner in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind. ”

“ Under what conditions, and by what means, this temperament is engendered in race or individual, we will not discuss at present. It is sufficient to note that it exists, and that there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the other senses and above them, separate from the reason and of nobler import, separate from the soul and of equal value--a sense that leads some to create, and others, the finer spirits as I think, to contemplate merely. ”

“ Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience. All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions. ”

“ They mean, “Thou knowest the truth of me and what is in me, and I know not what is in Thee; and the proof of this are His words, [380] ‘Thou art He who wottest the hidden things’”; and it is said, also, “Thou knowest my essence, but I know not Thine essence.” ”

“ The one criterion, whether of good or of truth, is the feeling of the moment for the man who feels it; all question of causes of feelings is delusive. We can say with truth and certainty, I have the sensation of white or the sensation of sweet. ”

“ They can judge with astounding correctness from a shadow on one's face, a catch in one's breath, a movement of one's hands, how their words or deeds are affecting us. We cannot conceal our feelings from them. ”

“ While sounding no absolutely new note in the world, she yet makes us aware of a talent of unusual distinction, and a highly endowed nature,—a sort of tact of sentiment and expression, an instinct of the true and beautiful, and that quick intuition which is like second-sight in its sensitiveness to apprehend and respond to external stimulus. ”

“ Here, what I want is known to me by virtue of its contrast with what another wants, and this contrast, rendering relatively clear my consciousness of my own intent, tends, by its very existence, and by reason of the blindness of my passion, to inflame the opposition. In a more benign, but also, as I judge, in even a more primitive form, appears the simple contrast of ego and non-ego in all my imitative, or explicitly plastic and socially submissive, states of consciousness. ”

“ But what if emphasis is natural to us? What if emphatic expression is the spontaneous expression of our nature? What if emphasis is the form of passion, just as what is called naturalness is the expression of sensuality and of good sense? ”

“ But when we pass from qualities like these, through doubtful and marginal cases, to the qualities we call 'sublime', 'beautiful', 'pathetic', 'humorous', 'melodious', and so forth, our position is quite different. What kind of existence are they known to possess apart from feeling? How are they to be measured except by the emotions they produce? ”

“ The commonest objection which the doctrine there laid down runs up against is drawn from the existence of our ‘affections.’ In our pleasures and pains, our loves and fears and angers, in the beauty, comicality, importance or preciousness of certain objects and situations, we have, I am told by many critics, a great realm of experience intuitively recognized as spiritual, made, and felt to be made, of consciousness exclusively, and different in nature from the space-filling kind of being which is enjoyed by physical objects. ”

“ All the secondary qualities, colours, sounds, tastes, smells, heat, hardness, everything, in short, which is an affection of sense, may be generalized at one sweep into our mere knowledge of things. But the primary qualities, which are usually restricted to extension and figure, and which constitute, it is said, the objective or real essence of things, and which are entirely independent of us, into what shall they be generalized? ”

“ The importance of this instinct upon human life is clearly revealed by the great place given to it under the name of love in art, literature, poetry, romance and all beauty from the beginning of recorded time. ”

“ Felix Clay, The Origin of the Sense of Beauty, p. 95: "The mind or the eye, brought face to face with a number of disconnected and apparently different facts, ideas, shapes, sounds or objects, is bothered and uneasy; the moment that some central conception is offered or discovered by which they all fall into order, so that their due relation to one another can be perceived and the whole grasped, there is a sense of relief and pleasure which is very intense." ”

“ I’m pretty much of a worldling, I daresay, but I don’t know how far I should like to stand in the way of a grand passion of elemental feelings. Their force and influence are, I think, a little outside my comprehension, outside, at any rate, my sphere. ”

“ The tension of those mutually antagonistic impulses which make balance, and so unity, and so the conditions for loss of sense of self, clears the way for tasting the full savor of pleasure in bright color, flowing line, exquisite tone-sequence, moving thought. ”

“ In an especial manner must the personification of Sentiment, of the Abstract, which owe their interest to the common desire of rendering permanent, by embodying, that which has given us pleasure, take its starting-point from the Actual; from something which, by universal association or particular expression, shall recall the Sentiment, Thought, or Time, and serve as their exponents; there being scarcely an object in Nature which the spirit of man has not, as it were, impressed with sympathy, and linked with his being. ”

“ Because of these affinities the spirit swiftly by intuition can interpret nature to itself even as our humanity instinctively comprehends the character betrayed by the curve of lips or the mood which lurks within haunting eyes. ”

“ The distinction is not a purely sentimental one—not a belief founded simply on emotion. There is a physical world—the world as known to our senses, and there is a psychical world—the world of feeling, consciousness, thought, and moral life. ”

“ Sensation, therefore, produces concepts of kind, and the correlates of likeness and unlikeness are involved. We may define sensation as the cognition of properties as kinds in their effects, and it is a compound of judgments; and a judgment is a combination of a sense impression, a consciousness, a choice, a concept, and a comparison. ”

“ Let us first try to understand what we know concerning ourselves. The longer one lives and the more one studies the mystery of "Being," the more one is forced to the conclusion that in every Human Being there are two Personalities, call them what you like—"the Real and its Image," "the Spiritual and its Material Shadow," or "the Transcendental and its Physical Ego." ”

“ I have thought, feeling, and affection, which pertain to me as a finite physical being; and I am made aware of that thought, that feeling, and that affection by the presence of this absolute principle within me; but at the same time they do not take their character from this absolute consciousness. Hence we hear persons talk about forming characters. But character is to be considered in a double sense. All possess this inmost character, and hence it is said that every individual in his inmost is divine. ”

“ It implies, in short, that it is not the sense itself which has been revealed to us in the one case as coloured, and in the other case as hard, but that it is something else which has been thus revealed to us. But it may still be asked, How do we know that we are not deceiving ourselves? How can it be proved that it is the senses, and not something else, which have come before us under the guise of certain sensations? ”

“ Next to be studied are the aids to emotional qualities, the common end of which is the evoking of emotions of the pleasurable kind. The conditions of treatment under which they are brought into effect are representative force, concreteness and objectivity, personification, harmony, ideality, novelty and variety, plot, and refinement. The qualities themselves are designated as strength or sublimity, beauty, feeling or pathos, humor, wit, and melody ”

“ This consciousness of perfect outer pureness—that to thy skin there now adheres no foreign speck of imperfection—how it radiates on thee, with cunning symbolic influences to thy very soul! thou hast an increased tendency towards all good things whatsoever. ”

“ There are habits of the soul which similarly impress an outward stamp upon the face and form so certainly that expression, attitude, and shape authentically declare the presence of the soul that so reveals itself. ”

“ As is observed by the author of the Analysis, the exposition in detail of the associations which enter into our various feelings of the sublime and beautiful, would require the examination of the subject on a scale not suited to the character nor proportioned to the dimensions of this Treatise. Of all our feelings, our acquired pleasures and pains, especially our pleasures, are the most complex; resulting from the whole of our nature and of our past lives, and involving, consequently, a greater multitude and variety of associations than almost any other phenomena of the mind. ”

“ Such the manifest tendency of the soul to stamp its own moods or complexion on all its surroundings;—to color and shape the outward in complete correspondence with itself. Men of the deepest insight have ever seen and acknowledged this law. ”

“ With the identification of the provinces of Truth and Thought no quarrel arises, and the Will and the Good are, as we shall see, intimately connected, but the attempts to fit Beauty into a neat pigeon-hole with Feeling have led to calamitous distortions. ”

“ It seems reasonable to me—upon the hypothesis that it is a person using another's mind or brain—that there must be more or less of that other's style or tone incorporated in the message, and that to the unseen personality, i.e., the power which impresses, the thought, the fact, or the philosophy, and not the style or tone, belongs. ”

“ Thus, entering into sympathy with their situations and states, we reproduce them in ourselves. In our tones, attitudes, gestures, and expressions of countenance, we unconsciously look, act, and seem like them. ”

“ The primary qualities are said to be of a different character, and to supply the information and the evidence which are wanted. These are principally extension, figure, and solidity. We are cognisant of these qualities, not as mere sensations in ourselves, like heat and cold, colour and sound, but as they exist and show themselves in external things. Heat and cold, colour and sound—in a word, all our sentient modifications—may be so increased in degree as to become unbearable. ”

“ Judging by my own sensations, however, the difference is not merely of degree, but of kind, for such accounts, with the reflections made upon them, have in them a certain tone and tinting of the mind through which they pass, so that we get, not nature, but man softening her. ”

“ With equal assurance may one appeal to the universal instinct which is gratified by the adaptation [Pg 87] of ends to means; to the innate human sense of the rightness of what is fitting; the constant pleasure in order, in appropriateness, in harmony. It is this instinct, this sense, this pleasure, which underlies the sensitiveness of the mind to what we call Elegance in composition. ”

“ We are not only "in matter," therefore, but we sub-create the matter, through our God-given modes of sensuous receptivity, and can only escape from it through an entire change of those modes, called "senses." ”

“ But we see clearly that every principle, which is to be realiter a principle of sensuous appearance, is itself sensuous, and cannot be at all thought as supersensuous and spiritual; not even as an Ego, much less as God ”

“ By the cognitive element, which is equally necessary with emotions to the existence of a valuable appreciation, I mean merely the actual cognition or consciousness of any or all of an object’s beautiful qualities—that is to say, any or all of those elements in the object which possess any positive beauty. ”

“ I am of course not discussing which view is right, but only showing that the discrimination between the primary feeling of beauty, as a pure incoming sensible quality, and the secondary emotions which are grafted thereupon, is one that must be made. ”

“ While we think we are imagining a character we may, so marvellous are the hidden ways, be really interpreting a being actually existing, brought into psychic contact with us by some affinity of sentiment or soul. ”

“ Through its operation, spirits are attracted to us who are similar in character to ourselves. The prevailing tenor of our thoughts and affections—the nature of the love that rules in our hearts—the kind of motives from which we generally act— the principles which govern us in our ordinary intercourse with men—these are the indices which reveal the character of our spiritual associates. ”

“ They pretend that his qualities of heart and mind, his passions, inclinations, virtues, faults, are so combined in his ardent, mobile nature, as to make him in reality the sport of chance; and that no inclination or passion whatsoever could ever become mistress of his heart or mind, so as to constitute the basis of a character, and render it possible to define it. ”