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Chapter XIVThe Suprarational BeautyRELIGION is the seeking after the spiritual, the suprarationaland therefore in this sphere the intellectual reasonmay well be an insufficient help and find itself, notonly at the end but from the beginning, out of its province andcondemned to tread either diffidently or else with a stumblingpresumptuousness in the realm of a power and a light higherthan its own. But in the other spheres of human consciousnessand human activity it may be thought that it has the right tothe sovereign place, since these move on the lower plane of therational and the finite or belong to that border-land where therational and the infrarational meet and the impulses and theinstincts of man stand in need above all of the light and thecontrol of the reason. In its own sphere of finite knowledge,science, philosophy, the useful arts, its right, one would think,must be indisputable. But this does not turn out in the end tobe true. Its province may be larger, its powers more ample, itsaction more justly self-confident, but in the end everywhere itfinds itself standing between the two other powers of our beingand fulfilling in greater or less degree the same function of anintermediary. On one side it is an enlightener — not always thechief enlightener — and the corrector of our life-impulses andfirst mental seekings, on the other it is only one minister of theveiled Spirit and a preparer of the paths for the coming of itsrule.This is especially evident in the two realms which in theordinary scale of our powers stand nearest to the reason and oneither side of it, the aesthetic and the ethical being, the searchfor Beauty and the search for Good. Man’s seeking after beautyreaches its most intense and satisfying expression in the great creativearts, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, but in its fullextension there is no activity of his nature or his life from which it