The Fourth Ray, of Harmony through Conflict or Beauty, is in Alice Bailey's system the ray of the artist, the mediator and the peacemaker who reaches harmony by first passing through struggle, the energy that resolves opposites, associated with beauty, art, the bridging of extremes, and the tension out of which resolution comes. It is linked to the planet Mercury and to a colour variously given, and its quality is the drive toward balance and the creative reconciliation of discord, its shadow the person trapped in the conflict without reaching the harmony.
Bailey held it to be especially associated with humanity itself. It is the first of the four rays of attribute, derived from the three major rays of aspect. As with the whole doctrine, the framework is modern Theosophy, Blavatsky in 1888, Bailey from the 1930s, and its planetary and colour attributions belong to that twentieth-century synthesis rather than to any ancient tradition of correspondences.