True Knowledge Requires the
Fulfillment of Certain Soul Needs
When Plato spoke of “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful”, he named the three foci of Reality known to mankind. These are not three “deities”. They are names given to ideals men seek. In the endeavor to come to terms with life, to live in harmony with the wide universe, Morality, Philosophy and Esthetics grow ever closer together in the mind, supporting and interblending with each other as a wider range of perception unfolds. For the wise man they become a single object of allegiance and devotion.
Tragedy has travelled hand in hand with attempts to define and describe one of these three without recognizing its area of interpenetration with the others. Moralists have erected forbidding edifices, categories of good and evil, which neglect philosophy, science and the arts. Philosophers and scientists have forgotten morality and the other sources of real beauty that are man’s inherited intuitions. Devotees of the arts have often become narrow-minded sensualists, failing to integrate morality or an all-inclusive philosophy with that which is emotionally pleasing. Thus we have philosophers dry and dusty, scientists a-moral, artists and esthetes emotionally uncontrolled. This unfortunate trifurcation has a long history in the Western world, and follows the same patterns that characterized previous ages of unenlightenment.
Religion dictated an artificial moral code by relying on fear and ignorance, and succeeded for a time in stultifying the growth of analytical thought and the refinement of instincts and intuitions. The rebellion resulting from ecclesiastical tyranny was poorly ordered. Men driven by a passion for scientific investigation lifted themselves by that passion, but failed to seek truth as a “whole”. Similarly did the majority of those who sought freedom in the quest for beauty or philosophic truth. Few there have been who knew that true beauty is goodness -wisdom in action, based on truth, proportion and harmony - for it has not been the Karma of the majority to live in the light of the ideas called Theosophical. Alone a few sages preserved the knowledge which could not be shared at once by all men, and it is not difficult to distinguish their synthesizing view from the countless religions, philosophies and concepts of the beautiful that characterize the various epochs of Western civilization. Fundamentally, they teach the way to think in terms of purpose.
“Good” is an almost meaningless term today, since churches and academicians have rendered it philosophically useless. “Truth” has suffered a like fate at the same hands. What of “beauty”? Here is a word or concept that has defied such persistent meddling. You cannot persuade a man that the life of another, or some personal experience, is a thing of beauty unless his intuition agrees. Truth, you may convince him, is any manner of things not true. On the question of what is right and wrong, or good and evil, you may easily deceive him. But in things of beauty he retains the right to judge for himself. He feels for himself and his intuitions are unique and intangible. The average man is seeking happiness, life in a world in which his ideals may have their place. Often he cannot be reached by counsels of self-denial for a formula or for a God, as reformers, ecclesiastical and secular, have found to their dismay. But he may be open to the suggestion that his ideal is a rare thing and must be sacrificed for, that it is the companion of those only who refine and elevate themselves.
W. MacNeile Dixon, whose Gifford lectures presented in The Human Situation have brought to the modern world Theosophical ideas in terms of a philosophy of idealism, indicates pointedly his desire to draw away from the realm of intellectual abstractions. “I must confess”, he says, “I am more enamoured of beauty than of truth. Beauty I think I know when I see it. Of truth I am never so sure.” He deprecates academic philosophizing, and explains that he finds greater value in deep-rooted and persistent intuitions. He therefore undertakes to use the term “beauty” for all the real values of the word “truth”. Dixon believes that the intellect should work in harmony with the heart and not be regarded as the infallible key to reality, which some modern professional philosophers have claimed it to be. “We have enthroned the measuring, reasoning faculties of man at the expense of the heart”, Dixon declares. “Who told you that nature has such a preference? We should aim at a conclusion which the intellect can accept and the heart approve.”
The importance of this suggestion is its relation to our age of materialism in philosophy. Our materialists try to explain away the basic human yearning for a philosophy of purpose in terms of human immortality as “mass psychological delusions”. For Dixon, genuine and deep beauty is truth, which all strive for, whether or no they can quote Aristotle or Spinoza.
To find beauty in living is to know meaning in living. A philosophy of the senses has no enduring meaning, will not provide the faith necessary for constant quest. Purpose in living is not merely a matter of sensations, for sensations are static; they cannot grow in worth as sensations. True and beautiful living is growth in the ability to build in fitting proportions, and this the soul alone can do, for the soul has a sense of “its secret share in the inexhaustible spring of eternity” and creates constantly for the future out of a long past.
Since every form of living intelligence has its share in this “inexhaustible spring of eternity”, all beings must be recognized as brothers - a part of the great harmony that is the universe. Our sense of proportion is faulty, our own house of life imperfect, unless we strive constantly to include the whole. Thus it can be seen that we grow primarily in terms of wider range of perception. Nature, or Life, always was, is and will be in proportion, because built on the constancy of that Law which is proportion in action.
Some levels of beauty we can share with another of like nature. Others can only be shared indirectly, through the effect of the experience of beauty upon thought, action and judgment. The appreciation of beauty is a psychic rather than a “spiritual” experience, but in the highest aspects of the psychic principle, where the soul of man perceives its oneness with the great soul of nature, are the most spiritual, as the most beautiful, of man’s “feelings”.
Man longs to stand alone, perhaps because he knows that aloneness is the secret of his dimly-felt strength as a man-God. The child loves his parents, but does not wish to be absorbed by that love. If the parent desires the love to be all-absorbing, it may be for the reason that he himself is no longer searching as eagerly for the spiritual self as he once did. The sense of complete self-identity felt in childhood is not the egotistical self-sufficiency that sometimes takes its place in later years. Every man, at some period in his life, has stood on a lonely crag and felt surges of strength within that promised the power to withstand all trials, to remain calm, serene, and inwardly protected. But few are the fountains of the beautiful in the modern world at which this inborn power can be renewed. Fewer still are those with the discrimination to perceive them under the over-hanging foliage of sensualism.
Yet even thoughtful followers of Epicurus are driven back to a consideration of eternal proportions and to that source of strength which, independent of sensations, is allied solely to our highest intuitions. A remarkable passage occurs, for instance, in a book which undertakes the defense of “sensualism”:
“We all have to pay toll to the race for what we take from it. But whatever system is established - capitalistic, communistic, or otherwise - in the land where we live, our devotion to efficiency, to justice, to the proletariat, or to our family cannot occupy the whole margin of our days or satisfy the whole craving of our nature. Underlying all our practical activity, there flows, deep and strong and clear, the subterranean river of our real happiness... ‘rich’ or ‘poor’, it is alone we deal with life, and alone we deal with the First Cause.”
“In its loneliness the self within us thinks of itself as suspended in a great void.... In fact, all the ecstasy we get from the most magical moments of our life were best associated with this feeling of being alone in the void.”
This offers the beginning of an understanding of beauty as philosophic truth. The next step is in realizing that while each “self” indeed stands alone, true knowledge requires the fulfillment of certain soul needs, and is the result of “ever-growing perception”. Then, and finally, the needs of one must be seen to be the needs of all, for no man can bring true meaning or proportion to his own inner life without seeking to bring it to all others.
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The article “Beauty as Philosophic Truth” was published on the websites of the Independent Lodge of Theosophists on 29 April 2025. It is reproduced from “Theosophy” magazine, Los Angeles, January 1943, pp. 127-130.
On the criteria to identify J. Garrigues as the author of the present text, see “Life and Writings of John Garrigues”.
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Read more:
* From Ritualism to Raja Yoga (by a Master of the Wisdom).
* The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali (by Manilal Nabhubhai Dvivedi).
* Raja Yoga or Mental Development (by Yogi Ramacharaka).
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Print the texts you study from the websites of the Independent Lodge. Reading on paper helps us attain a deeper view of philosophical texts. When studying a printed text, the reader can underline sentences and make handwritten comments in the margins that link the ideas to his personal reality.
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Helena Blavatsky (photo) wrote these words: “Deserve, then desire”.
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