The Sense of the Beautiful in Brutes [pp. 126-142]

BEAUTIFUL IN BRUTES.
the rich plumage of its cock, and the elevated enjoyment of
which we are conscious before the Venus of Milo, are only twc,
extreme degrees of the same msthetic power transmitted, andc
slowly amplified by the thousand and thousand centuries of labor of evolution; much more, it is the Aesthetic faculty of the
anim al which, by a discerning and marvellous eclecticism, selects
in the inferior species and gradually reunites all those perfections which collectively shall finally make up the eminent superiority of the human nature. Are these propositions as true as
they are novel? as certain as they are unlooked for? If the illustrious savant is right or wrong in regard to this prodigious
transmutation, he will be equally so in regard to the entirely
parallel evolution of the moral faculty bequeathed by the animal to man. To know the truth, we shall here limit ourselves to examining how Mr. Charles Darwin has come to give
such importance to the esthetic point of view-what are the
facts which according to him attest the presence of the faculty
of the beautiful in the brute-whether these facts have been
correctly interpreted,-finally, whether the animal, allowing to it
its just intellectual measure, can be legitimately considered as
the ancestor of reasoning man.
In studying the first chapters of the work on the Descent of
3lan, one gets the impression that the author attributes to the
different mental powers of the brute an equal part in the production of our faculties. Sensations of pleasure and of pain, the
perception of the useful, the moral sense, the social inclinations,
even the religious sentiment, all these dispositions, all these
aptitudes, the animal possesses in the germinant state, and no
particular one predominates over the others in energy or fruitfulness. The sense of the beautiful inscribed on the list seems
at first sight to figure there only like any other of those germs
whose ultimate expansion shall be the human mind; for hardly
two pages, in the theoretical exposition, are employed in signalizing the nascent glimmerings of the Tsthetic faculty in the
animal. After the complete reading of the work one is undeceived; he sees that the aptitude of the animal to know and
appreciate the beautiful, is incessantly recurring, and almost
acts the part of the mainspring in the complicated mechanism
of intellectual evolution.
How has a principle so little physiological, so rational, ina
1874.]