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The psychological aspect of beauty is a sensation which enters consciousness directly and immediately, without the need of words, and which therefore defies words, descriptions and definitions. Pure beauty in its highest manifestations does not favour interest in anything or anyone else, not even in the best friend or the most dearly loved sweetheart. It gives a feeling of expansion—not, however, towards other people, but towards a miraculous isolation. Pure beauty drives back those who are willing and able to receive it into the depths of the inner self. It supersedes all their other interests, isolates them and makes them feel sad. The main difficulty is not how to understand beauty but how to be able to stand it. The cartoon has a diametrically opposite tendency: it is the expression of the highest vitality, which overflows the confines of the individual and inundates all the world around it, blotting out the borderlines of the ego and creating a mood of unbroken gaiety and endless merriment. This id-stage of libido has nothing to do with beauty in its pure form. Beauty is much more closely related to perfect and eternal immobility. What happens to those who are under the spell of poetry is something other than a release from repression. It is the emergence of an emotional experience, hitherto only vaguely known, into full comprehension and intuitive understanding: an id-content is changed into an enrichment of our ego. The creative activity of the mind, in reacting to beauty, and in producing beauty, represents the highest form of the life of the mind, in which all its parts—the id, the ego and the super-ego—are co-ordinated. Death brings with it the striving after permanence, stability, immobility. The presence of death makes itself felt in the sadness of beauty, which in its fulness is more than ordinary mortals are able to face in their everyday