There is no province of honorable human endeavor, no clean inlet
opened by the senses or the intellect or the feelings, into which from
that vast, deep, oceanic spring, the human soul, the beautiful does
not send its fructifying tides. There is no height in history but is
illuminated by its gleam. Only through the beautiful can truth attain
its full stature; only through the beautiful can the heart be
perfectly purified; only with vision purged by the beautiful can
anything be seen in its totality. All other faculties it makes
prolific; it is the mental generator. It helps to unveil, and then
welds, the link between the visible and the invisible. It inspires
feeling (which is ever the source of deepest insight) to discover
excellence; it quickens the mind to creative activity; it is
forever striving upward. Without the spiritual fervor of the
beautiful, your religion is narrow and superstitious, your science
cramped and mortal, your life unripened. In the mind it kindles a
flame that discloses the divinity there is in all things. Lightning
bares to the awed vision the night-shrouded earth; more vivid than
lightning, the flash of the beautiful reveals to the soul the presence
of God.
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