The fourth ray sits at the centre of the seven, three above and three below, and Bailey's system makes a great deal of that position. It is described as the ray of harmony through conflict: not harmony instead of conflict, and not conflict resolved into calm, but a harmony that can only be arrived at by going through the opposition rather than around it. The artist is the standing example, because a work of art is a tension held rather than a tension removed.
The scheme also attaches the fourth ray to humanity itself, as the fourth kingdom of nature after the mineral, vegetable and animal. Human beings, on this account, are structurally the mediating term: aware enough to feel the contradiction between what they are and what they intend, and not yet resolved enough to stop feeling it. That is presented as the condition of the species rather than a fault in any individual.
The practical reading is the most humane thing in the ray literature. It says that a life which feels like an argument with itself is not thereby a failed life, and that the struggle is the medium the work is made in. The shadow is named just as plainly: the manufacture of conflict for its own sake, the person who cannot work except in crisis and arranges one when none is available.
The pattern is a modern one. Blavatsky supplied the sevenfold frame in 1888, Bailey the developed scheme from 1936, and no pre-modern tradition contains it.