What if the beautiful itself be the expression of something behind this material world, some character of the Invisible of which the visible is the revelation?
John Todhunter (1872) The Theory of the Beautiful, p. 17. Quoted in Jane Elizabeth Wright (2002) “Todhunter, John” in Thomas Duddy (ed) The Dictionary of Irish Philosophers, Thoemmes, pp. 329-30.
Todhunter’s idealist aesthetics saw the beautiful as an expression of the “Kosmical Order”, of which the Sublime was another expression. The essence of beauty for Todhunter was harmony, and the emotion produced by it was love.