Volume 1

Mind and brain, or, The correlations of consciousness and organisation; systemically investigated and applied to philosophy, mental science and practice / by Thomas Laycock.

Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mind and brain, or, The correlations of consciousness and organisation; systemically investigated and applied to philosophy, mental science and practice / by Thomas Laycock. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    this question.* By beautiful figures I do not mean what the mass of men might imagine—animal shapes or painted forms; but straight and curved lines, says my theory, and the planes and solids they generate with turning lathes, and rulers, and goniometers, if you understand. These have not a relative beauty, like other things, but are eternally and intrinsically beautiful, and attended with pleasures of their own to which those of scratching [from titillation?] have no resemblance. And I refer to colours of a similar kind. It is precisely in this generalisation of colours, sounds, and forms under the same geometrical laws of assthetics, with the same use of the goniometer, that the merit of the late D. E. Hay's theory consists—laws of the eternally and intrinsically beautiful Mr Dallas has evidently not realised the full meaning of Plato's or Hay's doctrines, for he observes elsewhere :— What is the relation of the parts, one to another, that constitutes beauty—why this relation of parts is beautiful, and not another—what is the harmony that exists between our minds and the objects we call beauti- ful, we know not.f The geometrical evolution of the human form is seen equally in a Venus de Medicis, or in a perfect female homo, and the geometrical relation of the parts can be determined by the goniometer (as affirmed by Plato). The artistic intuition or ideal is the correlative of this archetypal evolution, just as the intui- tion of the Ego or I is the correlative of the unity in development of the organism. In such an intuition all the other teleiotic ideas are potentially included, and are actually manifested as duality (symmetry), variety, and infinity. (See § 505, vol. ii., where this subject is further * The Gay Science, vol. ii. p. 68. + Ibid., vol. i. p. 106.