I believe however if we carefully analyze the nature of our ideas of impurity in
general, we shall find them refer especially to conditionsof matter in which its various elements are placed in a relation incapable of
healthy or proper operation; and most distinctly to conditions in which the
negation of vital or energetic action is most evident, as in corruption and
decay of all kinds, wherein particles which once, by their operation on each
other, produced a living and energetic whole, are reduced to a condition of
perfect passiveness, in which they are seized upon and appropriated, one by one,
piecemeal, by whatever has need of them,
cheap oil paintings, without any power of resistance or
energy of their own. And thus there is a peculiar painfulness attached to any
associations of inorganic with organic matter, such as appear to involve the
inactivity and feebleness of the latter, so that things which are not felt to be
foul in their own nature, yet become so in association with things of greater
inherent energy; as dust or earth, which in a mass excites no painful sensation,
excites a most disagreeable one when strewing or staining an animal's skin,
because it implies a decline and deadening of the vital and healthy power of the
skin. But all reasoning about this impression is rendered difficult, by the host of associated ideas
connected with it; for the ocular sense of impurity connected with corruption is
infinitely enhanced by the offending of other senses and by the grief and horror
of it in its own nature, as the special punishment and evidence of sin, and on
the other hand, the ocular delight in purity is mingled, as I before observed,
with the love of the mere element of light,
cheap oil painting,as a type of wisdom and of truth;
whence it seems to me that we admire the transparency of bodies, though probably
it is still rather owing to our sense of more perfect order and arrangement of
particles, and not to our love of light, that we look upon a piece of rock
crystal as purer than a piece of marble, and on the marble as purer than a piece
of chalk. And let it be observed also that the most lovely objects in nature are
only partially transparent. I suppose the utmost possible sense of beauty is conveyed
by a feebly translucent, smooth, but not lustrous surface of white, and pale
warm red, subdued by the most pure and delicate grays, as in the finer portions of the human frame; in
wreaths of snow, and in white plumage under rose light,so Viola of Olivia in Twelfth Night, and
Homer of Atrides wounded.And I think that transparency and lustre,
both beautiful in themselves, are incompatible with the highest beauty because
they destroy form, on the full perception of which more of the divinely
character of the object depends than upon its color. Hence, in the beauty of
snow and of flesh, so much translucency is allowed as is consistent with the
full explanation of the forms, while we are suffered to receive more intense
impressions of light and transparency from other objects which, nevertheless,
owing to their necessarily unperceived form, are not perfectly nor affectingly beautiful. A fair
forehead outshines its diamond diadem. The sparkle of the cascade withdraws not
our eyes from the snowy summits in their evening silence.
art oil paintings
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