Claude Fayette Bragdon

The Beautiful Necessity Claude Fayette Bragdon

The theosophic idea is that everything is an expression of the Self-or whatever other name one may choose to give to that immanent unknown reality which forever hides behind all phenomenal life-but because, immersed as we are in materiality, our chief avenue of knowledge is sense perception, a more exact expression of the theosophic idea would be: Everything is the expression of the Self in terms of sense. Art, accordingly, is the expression of the Self in terms of sense. Now though the Self is one, sense is not one, but manifold: and therefore there are arts, each addressed to some particular faculty or group of faculties, and each expressing some particular quality or group of qualities of the Self. The white light of Truth is thus broken up into a rainbow-tinted spectrum of Beauty, in which the various arts are colors, each distinct, yet merging one into another-poetry into music; painting into decoration; decoration becoming sculpture; sculpture-architecture, and so on.