'On Beauty and Being Just', part 4

Whenever Augustine touches something smooth, he begins to think of music and of God.

The sceptic disappointment and the loss / A boy feels when the poet he pores upon / Grows less and less sweet to him, and knows no cause. [Gerard Manley Hopkins]

(Beauty) has been perceived to be bound up with the immortal, for it prompts a search for a precedent, which in turn prompts a search for a still earlier precedent, and the mind keeps tripping backward until it at last reaches something that has no precedent, which may very well be the immortal.

The beautiful... incites in us the longing for truth because it provides by its compelling “clear discernibility” an introduction (perhaps even our first introduction) to the state of certainty yet does not itself satiate our desire for certainty since beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors.
The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterward one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction— to locate what is true.

... the moment of perceiving something beautiful confers on the perceiver the gift of life; and now we begin to see that the moment of perceiving beauty also confers on the object the gift of life.

palinode:  A formal statement of retraction.
saccadic: A rapid intermittent eye movement
coterminous: Having a boundary in common; contiguous

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