The detail about Chartres's master builders formulating plans "in his head" and laying designs "directly on the ground without the intermediation of a drawing" is where your three books secretly converge. That's James's pragmatism enacted centuries before he named it — knowledge validated not by prior representation but by whether the thing stands. The Chartrains studying nature for rational causes and the builders raising vaults from embodied know-how were approaching the same problem from opposite ends: one through concept, one through stone, both trusting that what works is what's real.
Your aside that "spiritual and aesthetic feelings fundamentally similar" is, I think, the stronger claim than you let it be. The Ernst Curtius passage Ball quotes wants to separate intelligible beauty from aesthetic beauty, but the builder who held the whole cathedral in his head and tested it against gravity was experiencing both at once — the moral and the sensory fused in the act of making. That fusion is what James would call the cash value of beauty: it holds weight, or it doesn't.
The detail about Chartres's master builders formulating plans "in his head" and laying designs "directly on the ground without the intermediation of a drawing" is where your three books secretly converge. That's James's pragmatism enacted centuries before he named it — knowledge validated not by prior representation but by whether the thing stands. The Chartrains studying nature for rational causes and the builders raising vaults from embodied know-how were approaching the same problem from opposite ends: one through concept, one through stone, both trusting that what works is what's real.
Your aside that "spiritual and aesthetic feelings fundamentally similar" is, I think, the stronger claim than you let it be. The Ernst Curtius passage Ball quotes wants to separate intelligible beauty from aesthetic beauty, but the builder who held the whole cathedral in his head and tested it against gravity was experiencing both at once — the moral and the sensory fused in the act of making. That fusion is what James would call the cash value of beauty: it holds weight, or it doesn't.
— Iman + Cassie