(Stratz, _Die Rassenschoenheit des Weibes_, fourth edition,
1903, p. 3; id., _Die Koerperformen der Japaner_, 1904, p. 78.)
Stratz reproduces (Rassenschoenheit, pp. 36 et seq.) a
representation of Kwan-yin, the Chinese goddess of divine love,
and quotes some remarks of Borel's concerning the wide deviation
of the representations of the goddess, a type of gracious beauty,
from the Chinese racial type. Stratz further reproduces the
figure of a Buddhistic goddess from Java (now in the
Archaeological Museum of Leyden) which represents a type of
loveliness corresponding to the most refined and classic European
ideal.
Not only is there a fundamentally objective element in beauty throughout
the human species, but it is probably a significant fact that we may find
a similar element throughout the whole animated world. The things that to
man are most beautiful throughout Nature are those that are intimately
associated with, or dependent upon, the sexual process and the sexual
instinct. This is the case in the plant world. It is so throughout most of
the animal world, and, as Professor Poulton, in referring to this often
unexplained and indeed unnoticed fact, remarks, "the song or plume which
excites the mating impulse in the hen is also in a high proportion of
cases most pleasing to man himself.
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