In the Mile End Road, opposite to the London Hospital, there was . . . a vacant greengrocer’s which was to let. The whole of the front of the shop, with the exception of the door, was hidden by a hanging sheet of canvas on which was the announcement that the Elephant Man was to be seen within . . . – from The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences by Frederick Treves (1923)
I am not here concerned with moral matters, as in the beauty of the virtues – of love or of honor. This is about the human experience of physical objects and of sensory impressions – of faces and bodies; of art and music; and tastes and smells. And about the sensory differences between the beautiful and the ugly.
My first observation is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. That phrase was popularized by Voltaire, who got it from an earlier 17th-century Italian source, Il meglio è l’inimico del bene, which is the more plausible, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Better because perfection exists only in God.
Augustine saw beauty as the materialization of the good. On the sixth day of Creation,
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