ABSTRACT
The gradual shift in values has a sweeping effect upon judgement and the estimation in which are held the various attributes of human nature. Thus goodness, beauty, strength, and generosity replace in esteem the initial enthralment to size, power, success, and sensuality. The author thinks that the material in both instances suggests that the apprehension of beauty contains in its very nature the apprehension of the possibility of its destruction. In the persecutory component of the experience young woman feels the beauty to be merely a screen for the greedy and cruel fingers of the witch-mother reaching into her to snatch away her vitality and scratch away her beauty. What the fragile ego of the child cannot sustain and is riven by, the lifetime of development strives to restore, so that the beauty of the object may be looked upon directly, without doing "damage to the soul", as Socrates feared.
