Beautiful is the Splendour of the True

"Do not misunderstand me. It is not the function of the artist to preach morality, to inculcate virtue. The laws of art are proper to itself. And they are the laws of beauty. But the beautiful is of the intellect, not of the senses, which merely supply the artist with his raw material. The eyes are only instruments of vision through which the soul looks. Aesthetic enjoyment is the reflection of an inner light or splendor from our reason upon material objects. The end of the intellect, let me repeat, is truth. · And in words which, though not Plato's, to whom they are often attributed, are as admirable as hackneyed, the 'beautiful is the splendour of the true'. Banish the ideal from the life of men, and by the operation of the inexorable law, Corruptio optimi pessima, men will sink below the level of the lower animals, and will love the abnormal, the monstrous, the deformed, for its own sake. Such is the natural fruit of that philosophy which rejects the only rational conceptions of Right and Wrong, and degrades to the region of molecular physics, conceptions properly appertaining to the domain of the organic and spiritual. Examples are not far to seek. And they are the sure signs of a decadent and effete civilization."

William Samuel Lilly