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Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture
by CLAUDE BRAGDON, F.A.I.A.
"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
The Beautiful Necessity was first published in 1910. Save for a slimvolume of privately printed verse it was my first book. I worked hardon it. Fifteen years elapsed between its beginning and completion;it was twice published serially—written, rewritten andtre-written—before it reached its ultimate incarnation in book form.
Confronted now with the opportunity to revise the text again, I findmyself in the position of a surgeon who feels that the operation heis called upon to perform may perhaps harm more than it can help.Prudence therefore prevails over my passion for dissection: warned byeminent examples, I fear that any injection of my more mature and lesscocksure 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 fewverbal changes, and whatever reservations I have about it shallbe stated in this preface. These are not many nor important: TheBeautiful Necessity contains nothing that I need repudiate or care tocontradict.
Its thesis, briefly stated, is that art in all its manifestations isan expression of the cosmic life, and that its symbols constitute alanguage by means of which this life is published and represented. Artis at all times subject to the Beautiful Necessity of proclaimingthe world order.
In attempting to develop this thesis it was not necessary (nor asI now think, desirable) to link it up in so definite a manner withtheosophy. The individual consciousness is colored by the particularmedium through which it receives truth, and for me that medium wastheosophy. 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 toimply a loss of faith in the fundamental tenets of theosophy, and suchan implication would not be true.
The ideas in regard to time and space are those commonly currentin the world until the advent of the Theory of Relativity. To ageneration brought up on Einstein and Ouspensky they are bound toappear "lower dimensional." Merely to state this fact is to dealwith it to the extent it needs to be dealt with. The integrity of myargument is not impaired by these new views.
The one important influence that has operated to modify my