Beauty of the Beast
By John Bascom
5/5
()
About this ebook
John Bascom
John Bascom (May 1, 1827 – October 2, 1911) was an American professor, college president and writer.He was born on May 1, 1827 in Genoa, New York, and was a graduate of Williams College with the class of 1849. He graduated from the Andover Theological Seminary in 1855. Aside from the degrees he received in those places, he held many other scholarly and honorary degrees. He was professor of rhetoric at Williams College from 1855 to 1874, and was president of the University of Wisconsin from 1874 to 1887. He retired in 1903] and died in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on October 2, 1911.He was the author of some forty books. He said in his biography the books cost him more money than he ever received from their publication. But he also included that he was glad to have written them and is only sorry that he could not have been of more service to his fellow men.
Related to Beauty of the Beast
Related ebooks
Cubism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kandinsky Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Naive Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsModern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVenus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-century Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings1000 Portraits of Genius Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The ultimate book on Picasso Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fauves Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Naïve Art 120 illustrations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Franz Marc and artworks Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Paul Klee Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Lempicka Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dada Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWomen Painters of the World From the Time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMalevich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Klimt: His Palette Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsArthur Dove: Always Connect Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHans Holbein the younger Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarc Chagall - Vitebsk -París -New York Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Paul Klee and artworks Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sophie Taeuber-Arp Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFranz Marc: 121 Paintings and Drawings Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Paint it Blue Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChagall and artworks Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Mondrian Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Modern Artists on Art: Second Enlarged Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enchantment the Art and Life of Lilian Westcott Hale: America's Linear Impressionist Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsForm as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Art For You
Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics From the DuBek Collection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Draw and Paint Anatomy, All New 2nd Edition: Creating Lifelike Humans and Realistic Animals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Book of Drawing: Essential Skills for Every Artist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Picture This: How Pictures Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Morpho: Anatomy for Artists Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Drawing School: Fundamentals for the Beginner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Designer's Dictionary of Color Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Drawing and Sketching Portraits: How to Draw Realistic Faces for Beginners Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Complete Papyrus of Ani Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Botanical Drawing: A Step-By-Step Guide to Drawing Flowers, Vegetables, Fruit and Other Plant Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Art 101: From Vincent van Gogh to Andy Warhol, Key People, Ideas, and Moments in the History of Art Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anatomy for Fantasy Artists: An Essential Guide to Creating Action Figures & Fantastical Forms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Shape of Ideas: An Illustrated Exploration of Creativity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tales From the Loop Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Draw Like an Artist: 100 Flowers and Plants Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Electric State Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oil and Marble: A Novel of Leonardo and Michelangelo Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Beauty of the Beast
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
Beauty of the Beast - John Bascom
Simple notion of beauty
In defining beauty, we say of it, first, that it is a simple and primary quality. It is uncompounded. No two or three qualities in any method present can compass it with their combined effects. No analysis can resolve it into other perceptions, but there always remains something unresolved and unexplained, which is beauty. This is proved by the fact that the most successful of these resolutions, while they hit on qualities frequently concomitant with beauty and intimately related to it, are never able to go beyond this companionship and show the identity of those qualities with beauty, whenever and wherever found. Unity and variety are qualities usually, I think always, in some degree present in beautiful objects. But though this presence may show them to be a condition for the existence of beauty, it does not show them to be its synonym or equivalent. In fact, we find that these qualities exist in many things which have no beauty.
Their range may include the field under discussion, but it certainly includes much more, and thereby shows that these qualities do not produce the distinguishing and peculiar effects of aesthetics. Thus is it with every combination of qualities into which we seek to analyse beauty. Either phenomena which should be included are left unexplained, or phenomena which do not belong to the department are taken in by the theory. These analyses, either by doing too much or too little, indicate that the precise thing to be done has not been done by them, and only prove a more or less general companionship, and not an identity of qualities. It is one thing to show that certain things, even, always accompany beauty, and quite another to show that these always and everywhere manifest themselves as beauty, reaching it in its manifold forms, and leaving nowhere any residuum of phenomena to be explained by a new quality. The idea of beauty has been with patient effort and elaborate argument referred to in association, thus not only making it a derived notion, but one reached through a great variety of pleasurable impressions. It is clear, however, that association has no power to alter original feelings, but only to revive them. Therefore, if beauty is not as an original notion or apprehension entrusted to association, it cannot be given by it since this law of the mind has no creating or transforming, but simply a uniting power. Association can explain the presence of ideas, not their nature.
On this theory, beauty must chiefly be confined to the old and the familiar, since upon these associations it has acted and been correspondingly excluded from the new, as not yet enriched by its relations. This is not the fact. The beauty of an object has no dependence upon familiarity, but is governed by considerations distinctly discernible at the first examination.
In individual experience, it is a matter of accident what objects ultimately become associated with pleasant or with unpleasant memories; and in community, association is as capricious as fashion. No such caprice, however, attaches to the decisions of taste. A uniformity indicative of many well-established principles belongs to these. So far as beautiful objects have been united by a firm association with wealth and elegance, this association itself must be explained by their prior and independent beauty. Beauty has occasioned this permanent and not groundless preference for wealth and elegance. The simplicity of this quality is seen in the presence of an unexplained and peculiar effect, after we have removed all the effects which can be ascribed to the known qualities present.
It is underived. The primary nature of beauty presents a question of some difficulty, since there are qualities with which it is often so intimately associated that its own existence in particular cases is dependent on theirs. Compared to qualities with which it is often associated, beauty can have the appearance of a secondary and subsidiary quality. In many things, their relations give limit and law to their beauty, and, as we here find the impression of beauty dependent on an obvious utility, coming and going therewith, it would seem an easy and correct explanation to refer this peculiar intuition and feeling to the perception and pleasure of an evident adaptation of means to an end in the object before us. The error of such a reference is clearly seen, however, in another class of cases, in which this quality is found to have no such connection with the useful and to exist in a high degree with no