550

Knowledge and beauty.  If, as they still do, people as it were reserve their reverence and feeling of happiness for works of imagination and dissembling, we ought not to wonder if the opposite of imagination and dissembling makes them feel cold and disconsolate. The delight produced by even the smallest definite piece of real progress in knowledge, which science as it is now bestows so abundantly and already upon so many  this delight is for the present not credited by all those who have accustomed themselves to finding delight only in relinquishing reality and plunging into the depths of appearance. These believe reality is ugly: but they do not reflect that knowledge of even the ugliest reality is itself beautiful, nor that he who knows much is in the end very far from finding ugly the greater part of that reality whose discovery has always brought him happiness. For is anything 'beautiful in itself'? The happiness of the man of knowledge enhances the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sunnier; knowledge casts its beauty not only over things but in the long run into things  may future mankind bear witness to the truth of this proposition! In the meantime let us recall an experience of olden time: two men as fundamentally different as Plato and Aristotle were in agreement as to what constituted supreme happiness, not only for them or for mankind but in itself, even for gods of the highest empyrean¹⁵²: they found it in knowledge, in the activity of a well-trained inquisitive and inventive mind (not, that is to say, in 'intuition', as German theologians and semi-theologians do; not in visions, as mystics do; and likewise not in creating, as all practical people do). Descartes and Spinoza came to a similar conclusion: how they must all have enjoyed knowledge! And what a danger their honesty faced of becoming a panegyrist of things!