It is significant that we talk nowadays of the occult. Occult and psychic activities there are in abundance; our life is made up of them, influencing our environment and conditions and relationship, man to man, and to the world-thought as well. Conceive then that the earth is enwrapped in this blanket of the world-thought, encompassing us as does the atmospheric sea; that we are projected into this psychic sea as we are born into the aerial expanse. Its elements are largely belief, tradition, custom in a word, ignorance. And the natural man for a time breathes in these elements, knowing nothing better.

This is an article all about art and the inspiration of beauty all around us.

For the artist there is all hope so long as he cleaves to the moral purpose of beauty, from thence draws his inspiration, with that fills his life. But let him depart from that and he is lost. Art, then, must be the temple wherein he worships the Sublime; his life a worship and his work the evidence of such the greatness, the virility, the purity of his work but the greater evidence. His inspiration must come from above and within. He must see beauty only, and know that beauty is spiritual.

Let him live in his Quartier Latin if he choose genial master of a lofty purpose with eyes only for the ideal. Art must be his bride, and art is but one form of worship of the immanent God. But if he cannot so live, let him forsake art. It is no use for him to fly to the top of the Altai Mountains. His weakness dwells there as well.

We are thus brought to the conclusion that man is not this sorry insect, this bug feebly crawling upon the face of the real and tangible earth, but in our essential nature we are the real, we the enduring; we project and contain it. In the immeasurable abyss of the soul rises and sets the sun; within, the stars take their course; within us is the dawn of the worlds, the twilight of the gods.

Within are the seasons: there sit night and day; from thence flow the hours. It is we who give birth to the Graces and the Muses. In the soul, beauty has its origin. Its source is spiritual and that is to say ethical its purpose ethical. Whatever beauty we appear to see without we are to refer to the soul; its perception, soul-perception, its perception spiritual, purposeful, educational with reference to the consciousness. We may infer the central purpose to be the education of the world-consciousness to perceive all-beauty, all-truth, all-love.

Beauty thus comes to be to us a certain measure of soul-perception.