内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Beauty and Morals in Nature " La nature est d'une insensibility absolue, d'une immorality transcendente."?Renan. Nature takes no account of the ethical idea in the social economy of man. She is indifferent to everything except the struggle for- life and beauty. But in the struggle towards the beautiful there is no moral aim. Some of the most beautiful flowers contain the most virulent poisons, while beautiful faces more often denote stupidity and egoism than goodness and wisdom. Nature is a sensual force, which, as Amiel says, is "sans pudeur et sans probite."" From the beginning she has striven, for.an expression .of.Jieauty, whether wise or ignorant, malignant or beneficent; and .thisi principle lies at the base, of the whole idea of creation, the one force acting in, through, and over all, ignoring the ethical idea developed by man, unconscious of his religious sentiment, blind to the scruples of civilisation, indifferent to the moral code and the moral character. What nature was and is in the plane of matter she continues to be in the sphere of the mind. Personal beauty is as potent to-day as it was at the courts of Solomon and Pericles. Place a beautiful woman of ordinary intelligence beside a number of celebrated women with plain features, and note the difference between the sensation created by comeliness and the respect paid to the celebrities In the daily battles waged between beauty and morals, the moralists are jaearly always out-generalled; for the prin- I ciple of beauty is a fundamental, changeless element in the order of the universe, while moral codes and notions belong to man, (differing according to religion and custom. Nature is inexorable in her multiple moods and methods. She laughs at systems and sermons, and while the preacher thinks his people wel...