The Beautiful Necessity

The Beautiful Necessity

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Beautiful Necessity, by Claude
Fayette Bragdon
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Title: The Beautiful Necessity
Author: Claude Fayette Bragdon
Release Date: June 18, 2004 [eBook #12648]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY
Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture
by CLAUDE BRAGDON, F.A.I.A.
MCMXXII

"Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity" --EMERSON

By the Same Author: Episodes From An Unwritten History The Golden
Person In The Heart Architecture And Democracy A Primer Of Higher
Space Four Dimensional Vistas Projective Ornament Oracle

CONTENTS
I THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE

II UNITY AND POLARITY
III CHANGELESS CHANGE
IV THE BODILY TEMPLE
V LATENT GEOMETRY
VI THE ARITHMETIC OF BEAUTY
VII FROZEN MUSIC
CONCLUSION

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The Beautiful Necessity was first published in 1910. Save for a slim
volume of privately printed verse it was my first book. I worked hard
on it. Fifteen years elapsed between its beginning and completion; it
was twice published serially--written, rewritten and tre-written--before
it reached its ultimate incarnation in book form.
Confronted now with the opportunity to revise the text again, I find
myself in the position of a surgeon who feels that the operation he is
called upon to perform may perhaps harm more than it can help.
Prudence therefore prevails over my passion for dissection: warned by
eminent examples, I fear that any injection of my more mature and less
cocksure consciousness into this book might impair its unity--that I
"never could recapture the first fine careless rapture."
The text stands therefore as originally published save for a few verbal
changes, and whatever reservations I have about it shall be stated in this
preface. These are not many nor important: The Beautiful Necessity
contains nothing that I need repudiate or care to contradict.
Its thesis, briefly stated, is that art in all its manifestations is an
expression of the cosmic life, and that its symbols constitute a language
by means of which this life is published and represented. Art is at all
times subject to the Beautiful Necessity of proclaiming the world order.
In attempting to develop this thesis it was not necessary (nor as I now
think, desirable) to link it up in so definite a manner with theosophy.
The individual consciousness is colored by the particular medium
through which it receives truth, and for me that medium was theosophy.

Though the book might gain a more unprejudiced hearing, and from a
larger audience, by the removal of the theosophic "color-screen," it
shall remain, for its removal now might seem to imply a loss of faith in
the fundamental tenets of theosophy, and such an implication would
not be true.
The ideas in regard to time and space are those commonly current in
the world until the advent of the Theory of Relativity. To a generation
brought up on Einstein and Ouspensky they are bound to appear "lower
dimensional." Merely to state this fact is to deal with it to the extent it
needs to be dealt with. The integrity of my argument is not impaired by
these new views.
The one important influence that has operated to modify my opinions
concerning the mathematical basis of the arts of space has been the
discoveries of Mr. Jay Hambidge with regard to the practice of the
Greeks in these matters, as exemplified in their temples and their
ceramics, and named by him Dynamic Symmetry.
In tracing everything back to the logarithmic spiral (which embodies
the principle of extreme and mean ratios) I consider that Mr. Hambidge
has made one of those generalizations which reorganizes the old
knowledge and organizes the new. It would be only natural if in his
immersion in his idea he overworks it, but Mr. Hambidge is a man of
such intellectual integrity and thoroughness of method that he may be
trusted not to warp the facts to fit his theories. The truth of the matter is
that the entire field of research into the mathematics of Beauty is of
such richness that wherever a man plants his metaphysical spade he is
sure to come upon "pay dirt." The Beautiful Necessity represents the
result of my own prospecting; Dynamic Symmetry represents the result
of his. If at any point our findings appear to conflict, it is less likely that
one or the other of us is mistaken than that each is right from