The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Let me point to one single instance. Schopenhauer speaks of beauty with melancholy ardour,—why in sooth does he do this? Because in beauty he sees a bridge on which one can travel further, or which stimulates one’s desire to travel further. According to him it constitutes a momentary emancipation from the “will”—it lures to eternal salvation. He values it more particularly as a deliverance from the “burning core of the will” which is sexuality,—in beauty he recognises the negation of the procreative instinct. Singular Saint! Some one contradicts thee; I fear it is Nature. Why is there beauty of tone, colour, aroma, and of rhythmic movement in Nature at all? What is it forces beauty to the fore? Fortunately, too, a certain philosopher contradicts him. No less an authority than the divine Plato himself (thus does Schopenhauer call him), upholds another proposition: that all beauty lures to procreation,—that this precisely is the chief characteristic of its effect, from the lowest sensuality to the highest spirituality.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.