The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty 263intellectual activity, practical utility and the externals of life: we
have to go for it to exceptional individuals gifted with a finer
strain, but the wide-spread aesthetic instinct has been lost and
has yet to be recovered for the common mind and recognised
once more as a part of human perfection as indispensable as
intellectual knowledge and at least as necessary to happiness
as vital well-being. But this Ananda, this delight, this aesthesis
which is the soul of poetic beauty works like other things, like
poetic truth or the poetic breath of life, on different levels, in
different provinces of its action, with the same law that we have
observed in the rest, of the emergence of a richer and profounder
face of itself the more it gets inward and upward from the less
to the more occult powers of its revelation. This finer soul of
delight throws itself out on the physical mind and being, takes
up its experiences and turns them by its own innate and peculiar
power into things of beauty, fuses into itself the experiences of
the life soul and transmutes to beauty their power and passion
in the surge of its poetic ecstasy, takes up all life and form into
the reflective thought-mind and changes them in the beauty and
rapture of thought discovering and embodying new values of
soul and Nature and existence. And in all its working there is
felt its own essence of an intuitive delight which acts in these
moulds and gets into them whatever it can of its own intimate
and eternal delight values. But when that intuitive mind self-
finding, self-seeing, self-creating in a higher power of light and
vision than is possible on the intellectual or other levels gets out
into full play, and now there is some sign of this emergence,
then we come nearer to the most potent sources of universal
and eternal delight and beauty, nearer to its full and wide seeing,
and its all-embracing rapture. This inner mind is the first native
power of the self and spirit dropping its lower veils and the
very life and aesthesis of the spirit in its creation is a life of
self-experiencing spiritual delight and a luminous Ananda.
The beauty and delight of such a greater intuitive inspi-
ration, a poetry of this spiritual Ananda making all existence
luminous and wonderful and beautiful to us may be one of the
gifts of the future. It is that of which we stand in need and