yogaEQ

“Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world” – Emerson

“The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us.” – Goethe

This notion of beauty as a focal lens for intellectual curiosity was how Mitchell herself saw the universe, and perhaps how every person of genius does. Beauty magnetizes curiosity and wonder, beckoning us to discover—in the literal sense, to uncover and unconceal—what lies beneath the surface of the human label. What we recognize as beauty may be a language for encoding truth, a memetic mechanism for transmitting it, as native to the universe as mathematics—the one perceived by the optical eye, the other by the mind’s eye. “Do not wonder at the fair landscape,” Emerson exhorted himself in his journal, “but at the necessity of Beauty under which the universe is.” In the preface to her translation of Prometheus Bound, the twenty-seven-year-old Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

All beauties, whether in nature or art, in physics or morals, in composition or abstract reasoning, are multiplied reflections, visible in different distances[…]”

Excerpt From: Popova, Maria. “Figuring.” *

• “The question of beauty’s purpose and significance had arisen as one of the animating inquiries at Margaret Fuller’s “Conversations,” when during an 1841 session devoted to Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, many of the women insisted that “the principle of Beauty” ought to be factored into any definition of wisdom. Fuller then ruled that a definition of beauty must be devised first. She asked each woman in attendance to provide her own. One defined it as “the Infinite apprehended.” Another argued that beauty is “the central unifying power” of existence. Brook Farm cofounder Sophia Ripley pointed to it as an embodiment of “the All” and defined it as “the mode in which truth appears.” But Fuller, in her role as sybil-arbiter, observed that these definitions could be applied equally to love and truth. Challenging the women to reflect further, she tasked them with composing short essays of more precise definition for the next gathering.”
• “The debate about beauty impressed itself upon the mind of the young Sophia Peabody, who was in awed attendance at Fuller’s gathering. Seventeen years later, while traveling through Europe with Maria Mitchell, Sophia—by then Sophia Hawthorne—would gaze up at the fan vaulting over Queen Catharine’s tomb and reflect:
• Take one of the divisions by itself and it looks like a rocket falling in stars or flowers, the motion in rest everywhere suggested. In comparing Gothic with the Greek architecture, one is the clear, logical understanding, coming at truth mathematically by the way of reason; and all this range of truth stands beautiful and sure, on lovely, even pillars, surmounted with square pediments, symmetrical and perfect to the eye.
• Contrasting this with the Gothic, which traffics in “baffling geometric conclusions, setting known, established rules at defiance, wild beyond reach of recognized art, flaming like fire, glowing like flowers and rainbows, soaring like birds, struggling for freedom, and like the soul, never satisfied,” she concludes:
• A cathedral is really an image of the whole soul of man; and a Greek temple, of his understanding only—of just decisions, serene, finished postulates, settled axioms. We need both.”