the realization of those traits which swallow up defects and so render them non-existent.  A great artist, Rodin, after a life spent in the study of Nature, has declared that for art there is no ugliness in Nature.  “I have arrived at this belief by the study of Nature,” he said; “I can only grasp the beauty of the soul by the beauty of the body, but some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and will declare how the whole earth is beautiful, and all human beings beautiful.  I have never been able to say this in sculpture so well as I wish and as I feel it affirmed within me.  For poets Beauty has always been some particular landscape, some particular woman; but it should be all women, all landscapes.  A negro or a Mongol has his beauty, however remote from ours, and it must be the same with their characters.  There is no ugliness.  When I was young I made that mistake, as others do; I could not undertake a woman’s bust unless I thought her pretty, according to my particular idea of beauty; to-day I should do the bust of any woman, and it would be just as beautiful.  And however ugly a woman may look, when she is with her lover she becomes beautiful; there is beauty in her character, in her passions, and beauty exists as soon as character or passion becomes visible, for the body is a casting on which passions are imprinted.  And even without that, there is always the blood that flows in the veins and the air that fills the lungs."[68]

The saint, also, is here at one with the lover and the artist.  The man who has so profoundly realized the worth of his fellow men that he is ready even to die in order to save them, feels that he has discovered a great secret.  Cyples traces the “secret delights” that have thus risen in the hearts of holy men to the same source as the feelings generated between lovers, friends, parents, and children.  “A few have at intervals walked in the world,” he remarks, “who have, each in his own original way, found out this marvel....  Straightway man in general has become to them so sweet a thing that the infatuation has seemed to the rest of their fellows to be a celestial madness.  Beggars’ rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for kissing, because humanity had touched the garb; there were no longer any menial acts, but only welcome services....  Remember by how much man is the subtlest circumstance in the world; at how many points he can attach relationships; how manifold and perennial he is in his results.  All other things are dull, meager, tame beside him."[69]

It may be added that even if we still believe that lover and artist and saint are drawing the main elements of their conceptions from the depths of their own consciousness, there is a sense in which they are coming nearer to the truth of things than those for whom their conceptions are mere illusions.  The aptitude for realizing beauty has involved an adjustment of the nerves and the associated brain centers through countless ages that began before man was.  When the vision of supreme beauty is slowly or suddenly realized by anyone, with a reverberation that extends throughout his organism, he has attained to something which for his species, and for far more than his species, is truth, and can only be illusion to one who has artificially placed himself outside the stream of life.