Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul.

Bancroft frames beauty in a Romantic-idealist way: it is not merely a pleasing surface quality but a perceptible (“sensible”) manifestation of something boundless and transcendent (“the Infinite”). By aligning beauty with truth and justice, he treats aesthetic experience as morally and intellectually serious—an inner faculty or recognition rather than an external ornament. The claim that beauty “lives within us” suggests that our capacity to perceive beauty is rooted in the soul’s structure, akin to conscience or the “moral law.” In this view, beauty accompanies and elevates human life by pointing the mind beyond the finite world toward enduring, universal realities.