PART I

Produced by Ruth Hart

[Note: for this online edition I have moved the Table of Contents

to the beginning of the text and slightly modified it to conform

with the online format. I have also made one spelling change:

"ominiscient intelligence" to "omniscient intelligence".]

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

BEING THE OUTLINES OF AESTHETIC THEORY

by

GEORGE SANTAYANA

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON

COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction — The Methods of Aesthetics 1-13

Part I. — The Nature of Beauty

§ 1. The philosophy of beauty is a theory of values 14

§ 2. Preference is ultimately irrational 18

§ 3. Contrast between moral and aesthetic values 28

§ 4. Work and play 25

§ 5. All values are in one sense aesthetic 28

§ 6. Aesthetic consecration of general principles 31

§ 7. Contrast of aesthetic and physical pleasures 35

§ 8. The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its disinterestedness 37

§ 9. The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its universality 40

§ 10. The differential of aesthetic pleasure: its objectification 44

§ 11. The definition of beauty 49

Part II. — The Materials of Beauty

§ 12. All human functions may contribute to the sense of beauty 53

§ 13. The influence of the passion of love 56

§ 14. Social instincts and their aesthetic influence 62

§ 15. The lower senses 65

§ 16. Sound 68

§ 17. Colour 72

§ 18. Materials surveyed 76

Part III. — Form

§ 19. There is a beauty of form 82

§ 20. Physiology of the perception of form 85

§ 21. Values of geometrical figures 88

§ 22. Symmetry 91

§ 23. Form the unity of a manifold 95

§ 24. Multiplicity in uniformity 97

§ 25. Example of the stars 100

§ 26. Defects of pure multiplicity 106

§ 27. Aesthetics of democracy 110

§ 28. Values of types and values of examples 112

§ 29. Origin of types 116

§ 30. The average modified in the direction of pleasure 121

§ 31. Are all things beautiful? 126

§ 32. Effects of indeterminate form 131

§ 33. Example of landscape 133

§ 34. Extensions to objects usually not regarded aesthetically 138

§ 35. Further dangers of indeterminateness 142

§ 36. The illusion of infinite perfection 146

§ 37. Organized nature the source of apperceptive forms 152

§ 38. Utility the principle of organization in nature 155

§ 39. The relation of utility to beauty 157

§ 40. Utility the principle of organization in the arts 160

§ 41. Form and adventitious ornament 163

§ 42. Syntactical form 167

§ 42. Literary form. The plot 171

§ 44. Character as an aesthetic form 174

§ 45. Ideal characters 176

§ 46. The religious imagination 180

§ 47. Preference is ultimately irrational 185

Part IV. — Expression

§ 48. Expression defined 192

§ 49. The associative process 198

§ 50. Kinds of value in the second term 201

§ 51. Aesthetic value in the second term 205

§ 52. Practical value in the same 208

§ 53. Cost as an element of effect 211

§ 54. The expression of economy and fitness 214

§ 55. The authority of morals over aesthetics 218

§ 56. Negative values in the second term 221

§ 57. Influence of the first term in the pleasing expression of evil 226

§ 58. Mixture of other expressions, including that of truth 228

§ 59. The liberation of self 233

§ 60. The sublime independent of the expression of evil 239

§ 61. The comic 245

§ 62. Wit 250

§ 63. Humour 253

§ 64. The grotesque 256

§ 65. The possibility of finite perfection 258

§ 66. The stability of the ideal 263

§ 67. Conclusion 266-270

Footnotes

Index 271-275

PREFACE

This little work contains the chief ideas gathered together for a

course of lectures on the theory and history of aesthetics given at

Harvard College from 1892 to 1895. The only originality I can

claim is that which may result from the attempt to put together the

scattered commonplaces of criticism into a system, under the

inspiration of a naturalistic psychology. I have studied sincerity

rather than novelty, and if any subject, as for instance the

excellence of tragedy, is presented in a new light, the change

consists only in the stricter application to a complex subject of the

principles acknowledged to obtain in our simple judgments. My

effort throughout has been to recall those fundamental aesthetic

feelings the orderly extension of which yields sanity of judgment

and distinction of taste.

The influences under which the book has been written are rather

too general and pervasive to admit of specification; yet the student

of philosophy will not fail to perceive how much I owe to writers,

both living and dead, to whom no honour could be added by my

acknowledgments. I have usually omitted any reference to them in

foot-notes or in the text, in order that the air of controversy might

be avoided, and the reader might be enabled to compare what is

said more directly with the reality of his own experience.

G. S.

September, 1906.

INTRODUCTION

The sense of beauty has a more important place in life than

aesthetic theory has ever taken in philosophy. The plastic arts, with

poetry and music, are the most conspicuous monuments of this

human interest, because they appeal only to contemplation, and yet

have attracted to their service, in all civilized ages, an amount of

effort, genius, and honour, little inferior to that given to industry,

war, or religion. The fine arts, however, where aesthetic feeling

appears almost pure, are by no means the only sphere in which

men show their susceptibility to beauty. In all products of human

industry we notice the keenness with which the eye is attracted to

the mere appearance of things: great sacrifices of time and labour

are made to it in the most vulgar manufactures; nor does man

select his dwelling, his clothes, or his companions without

reference to their effect on his aesthetic senses. Of late we have

even learned that the forms of many animals are due to the survival

by sexual selection of the colours and forms most attractive to the

eye. There must therefore be in our nature a very radical and

wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of

the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so

conspicuous a faculty.

That aesthetic theory has received so little attention from the world

is not due to the unimportance of the subject of which it treats, but

rather to lack of an adequate motive for speculating upon it, and to

the small success of the occasional efforts to deal with it. Absolute

curiosity, and love of comprehension for its own sake, are not

passions we have much leisure to indulge: they require not only

freedom from affairs but, what is more rare, freedom from

prepossessions and from the hatred of all ideas that do not make

for the habitual goal of our thought.

Now, what has chiefly maintained such speculation as the world

has seen has been either theological passion or practical use. All

we find, for example, written about beauty may be divided into

two groups: that group of writings in which philosophers have

interpreted aesthetic facts in the light of their metaphysical

principles, and made of their theory of taste a corollary or footnote

to their systems; and that group in which artists and critics have

ventured into philosophic ground, by generalizing somewhat the

maxims of the craft or the comments of the sensitive observer. A

treatment of the subject at once direct and theoretic has been very

rare: the problems of nature and morals have attracted the

reasoners, and the description and creation of beauty have

absorbed the artists; between the two reflection upon aesthetic

experience has remained abortive or incoherent.

A circumstance that has also contributed to the absence or to the

failure of aesthetic speculation is the subjectivity of the

phenomenon with which it deals. Man has a prejudice against

himself: anything which is a product of his mind seems to him to

be unreal or comparatively insignificant. We are satisfied

only when we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and laws

independent of our nature. The ancients long speculated about the

constitution of the universe before they became aware of that mind

which is the instrument of all speculation. The moderns, also, even

within the field of psychology, have studied first the function of

perception and the theory of knowledge, by which we seem to be

informed about external things; they have in comparison neglected

the exclusively subjective and human department of imagination

and emotion. We have still to recognize in practice the truth that

from these despised feelings of ours the great world of perception

derives all its value, if not also its existence. Things are interesting

because we care about them, and important because we need them.

Had our perceptions no connexion with our pleasures, we should

soon close our eyes on this world; if our intelligence were of no

service to our passions, we should come to doubt, in the lazy

freedom of reverie, whether two and two make four.

Yet so strong is the popular sense of the unworthiness and

insignificance of things purely emotional, that those who have

taken moral problems to heart and felt their dignity have often

been led into attempts to discover some external right and beauty

of which, our moral and aesthetic feelings should be perceptions or

discoveries, just as our intellectual activity is, in men's opinion, a

perception or discovery of external fact. These philosophers seem

to feel that unless moral and aesthetic judgments are expressions of

objective truth, and not merely expressions of human nature, they

stand condemned of hopeless triviality. A judgment is not trivial,

however, because it rests on human feelings; on the contrary,

triviality consists in abstraction from human interests; only those

judgments and opinions are truly insignificant which wander

beyond the reach of verification, and have no function in the

ordering and enriching of life.

Both ethics and aesthetics have suffered much from the prejudice

against the subjective. They have not suffered more because both

have a subject-matter which is partly objective. Ethics deals with

conduct as much as with emotion, and therefore considers the

causes of events and their consequences as well as our judgments

of their value. Esthetics also is apt to include the history and

philosophy of art, and to add much descriptive and critical matter

to the theory of our susceptibility to beauty. A certain confusion is

thereby introduced into these inquiries, but at the same time the

discussion is enlivened by excursions into neighbouring provinces,

perhaps more interesting to the general reader.

We may, however, distinguish three distinct elements of ethics and

aesthetics, and three different ways of approaching the subject. The

first is the exercise of the moral or aesthetic faculty itself, the

actual pronouncing of judgment and giving of praise, blame, and

precept. This is not a matter of science but of character, enthusiasm,

niceness of perception, and fineness of emotion. It is aesthetic or

moral activity, while ethics and aesthetics, as sciences, are

intellectual activities, having that aesthetic or moral activity for

their subject-matter.

The second method consists in the historical explanation of

conduct or of art as a part of anthropology, and seeks to discover

the conditions of various types of character, forms of polity,

conceptions of justice, and schools of criticism and of art. Of this

nature is a great deal of what has been written on aesthetics. The

philosophy of art has often proved a more tempting subject than

the psychology of taste, especially to minds which were not so

much fascinated by beauty itself as by the curious problem of the

artistic instinct in man and of the diversity of its manifestations in

history.

The third method in ethics and aesthetics is psychological, as the

other two are respectively didactic and historical. It deals with

moral and aesthetic judgments as phenomena of mind and products

of mental evolution. The problem here is to understand the origin

and conditions of these feelings and their relation to the rest of our

economy. Such an inquiry, if pursued successfully, would yield an

understanding of the reason why we think anything right or

beautiful, wrong or ugly, it would thus reveal the roots of

conscience and taste in human nature and enable us to distinguish

transitory preferences and ideals, which rest on peculiar conditions,

from those which, springing from those elements of mind which all

men share, are comparatively permanent and universal.

To this inquiry, as far as it concerns aesthetics, the following pages

are devoted. No attempt will be made either to impose particular

appreciations or to trace the history of art and criticism. The

discussion will be limited to the nature and elements of our

aesthetic judgments. It is a theoretical inquiry and has no directly

hortatory quality. Yet insight into the basis of our preferences, if it

could be gained, would not fail to have a good and purifying

influence upon them. It would show us the futility of a dogmatism

that would impose upon another man judgments and emotions for

which the needed soil is lacking in his constitution and experience;

and at the same time it would relieve us of any undue diffidence or

excessive tolerance towards aberrations of taste, when we know

what are the broader grounds of preference and the habits that

make for greater and more diversified aesthetic enjoyment.

Therefore, although nothing has commonly been less attractive

than treatises on beauty or less a guide to taste than disquisitions

upon it, we may yet hope for some not merely theoretical gain

from these studies. They have remained so often without practical

influence because they have been pursued under unfavourable

conditions. The writers have generally been audacious metaphysicians

and somewhat incompetent critics; they have represented

general and obscure principles, suggested by other parts

of their philosophy, as the conditions of artistic excellence

and the essence of beauty. But if the inquiry is kept close to the

facts of feeling, we may hope that the resulting theory may have a

clarifying effect on the experience on which it is based. That is,

after all, the use of theory. If when a theory is bad it narrows our

capacity for observation and makes all appreciation vicarious and

formal, when it is good it reacts favourably upon our powers,

guides the attention to what is really capable of affording

entertainment, and increases, by force of new analogies, the range

of our interests. Speculation is an evil if it imposes a foreign

organization on our mental life; it is a good if it only brings to light,

and makes more perfect by training, the organization already

inherent in it.

We shall therefore study human sensibility itself and our actual

feelings about beauty, and we shall look for no deeper,

unconscious causes of our aesthetic consciousness. Such value as

belongs to metaphysical derivations of the nature of the beautiful,

comes to them not because they explain our primary feelings,

which they cannot do, but because they express, and in fact

constitute, some of our later appreciations. There is no explanation,

for instance, in calling beauty an adumbration of divine attributes.

Such a relation, if it were actual, would not help us at all to

understand why the symbols of divinity pleased. But in certain

moments of contemplation, when much emotional experience lies

behind us, and we have reached very general ideas both of nature

and of life, our delight in any particular object may consist in

nothing but the thought that this object is a manifestation of

universal principles. The blue sky may come to please chiefly

because it seems the image of a serene conscience, or of the eternal

youth and purity of nature after a thousand partial corruptions. But

this expressiveness of the sky is due to certain qualities of the

sensation, which bind it to all things happy and pure, and, in a

mind in which the essence of purity and happiness is embodied in

an idea of God, bind it also to that idea.

So it may happen that the most arbitrary and unreal theories, which

must be rejected as general explanations of aesthetic life, may be

reinstated as particular moments of it. Those intuitions which we

call Platonic are seldom scientific, they seldom explain the

phenomena or hit upon the actual law of things, but they are often

the highest expression of that activity which they fail to make

comprehensible. The adoring lover cannot understand the natural

history of love; for he is all in all at the last and supreme stage of

its development. Hence the world has always been puzzled in its

judgment of the Platonists; their theories are so extravagant, yet

their wisdom seems so great. Platonism is a very refined and

beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it embodies

conscience and utters our inmost hopes. Platonic philosophers have

therefore a natural authority, as standing on heights to which

the vulgar cannot attain, but to which they naturally and

half-consciously aspire.

When a man tells you that beauty is the manifestation of God to

the senses, you wish you might understand him, you grope for a

deep truth in his obscurity, you honour him for his elevation of

mind, and your respect may even induce you to assent to what he

says as to an intelligible proposition. Your thought may in

consequence be dominated ever after by a verbal dogma, around

which all your sympathies and antipathies will quickly gather, and

the less you have penetrated the original sense of your creed, the

more absolutely will you believe it. You will have followed

Mephistopheles' advice: --

Im ganzen haltet euch an Worte,

So geht euch durch die sichere Pforte

Zum Tempel der Gewissheit ein.

Yet reflection might have shown you that the word of the master

held no objective account of the nature and origin of beauty, but

was the vague expression of his highly complex emotions.

It is one of the attributes of God, one of the perfections which we

contemplate in our idea of him, that there is no duality or

opposition between his will and his vision, between the impulses

of his nature and the events of his life. This is what we commonly

designate as omnipotence and creation. Now, in the contemplation

of beauty, our faculties of perception have the same perfection: it is

indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the

occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that

we draw our conception of the divine life. There is, then, a real

propriety in calling beauty a manifestation of God to the senses,

since, in the region of sense, the perception of beauty exemplifies

that adequacy and perfection which in general we objectify in an

idea of God.

But the minds that dwell in the atmosphere of these analogies are

hardly those that will care to ask what are the conditions and the

varieties of this perfection of function, in other words, how it

comes about that we perceive beauty at all, or have any inkling of

divinity. Only the other philosophers, those that wallow in

Epicurus' sty, know anything about the latter question. But it is

easier to be impressed than to be instructed, and the public is very

ready to believe that where there is noble language not

without obscurity there must be profound knowledge. We should

distinguish, however, the two distinct demands in the case. One is

for comprehension; we look for the theory of a human function

which must cover all possible cases of its exercise, whether noble

or base. This the Platonists utterly fail to give us. The other

demand is for inspiration; we wish to be nourished by the maxims

and confessions of an exalted mind, in whom the aesthetic function

is pre-eminent. By responding to this demand the same thinkers

may win our admiration.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to

feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried

by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this

is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be. The

poets and philosophers who express this aesthetic experience and

stimulate the same function in us by their example, do a greater

service to mankind and deserve higher honour than the discoverers

of historical truth. Reflection is indeed a part of life, but the last

part. Its specific value consists in the satisfaction of curiosity, in

the smoothing out and explanation of things: but the greatest

pleasure which we actually get from reflection is borrowed from

the experience on which we reflect. We do not often indulge in

retrospect for the sake of a scientific knowledge of human life, but

rather to revive the memories of what once was dear. And I should

have little hope of interesting the reader in the present analyses, did

I not rely on the attractions of a subject associated with so many of

his pleasures.

But the recognition of the superiority of aesthetics in experience to

aesthetics in theory ought not to make us accept as an explanation

of aesthetic feeling what is in truth only an expression of it. When

Plato tells us of the eternal ideas in conformity to which all

excellence consists, he is making himself the spokesman of the

moral consciousness. Our conscience and taste establish these

ideals; to make a judgment is virtually to establish an ideal, and all

ideals are absolute and eternal for the judgment that involves them,

because in finding and declaring a thing good or beautiful, our

sentence is categorical, and the standard evoked by our judgment is

for that case intrinsic and ultimate. But at the next moment, when

the mind is on another footing, a new ideal is evoked, no less

absolute for the present judgment than the old ideal was for the

previous one. If we are then expressing our feeling and confessing

what happens to us when we judge, we shall be quite right in

saying that we have always an absolute ideal before us, and that

value lies in conformity with that ideal. So, also, if we try to define

that ideal, we shall hardly be able to say of it anything less noble

and more definite than that it is the embodiment of an infinite good.

For it is that incommunicable and illusive excellence that haunts

every beautiful thing, and

like a star

Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.

For the expression of this experience we should go to the poets, to

the more inspired critics, and best of all to the immortal parables of

Plato. But if what we desire is to increase our knowledge rather

than to cultivate our sensibility, we should do well to close all

those delightful books; for we shall not find any instruction there

upon the questions which most press upon us; namely, how an

ideal is formed in the mind, how a given object is compared with it,

what is the common element in all beautiful things, and what the

substance of the absolute ideal in which all ideals tend to be lost;

and, finally, how we come to be sensitive to beauty at all, or to

value it. These questions must be capable of answers, if any

science of human nature is really possible. -- So far, then, are we

from ignoring the insight of the Platonists, that we hope to explain

it, and in a sense to justify it, by showing that it is the natural and

sometimes the supreme expression of the common principles of

our nature.

PART I

THE NATURE OF BEAUTY

_The philosophy of beauty is a theory of values._

§ 1. It would be easy to find a definition of beauty that should give

in a few words a telling paraphrase of the word. We know on

excellent authority that beauty is truth, that it is the expression of

the ideal, the symbol of divine perfection, and the sensible

manifestation of the good. A litany of these titles of honour might

easily be compiled, and repeated in praise of our divinity. Such

phrases stimulate thought and give us a momentary pleasure, but

they hardly bring any permanent enlightenment. A definition that

should really define must be nothing less than the exposition of the

origin, place, and elements of beauty as an object of human

experience. We must learn from it, as far as possible, why, when,

and how beauty appears, what conditions an object must fulfil to

be beautiful, what elements of our nature make us sensible of

beauty, and what the relation is between the constitution of the

object and the excitement of our susceptibility. Nothing less will

really define beauty or make us understand what aesthetic

appreciation is. The definition of beauty in this sense will be the

task of this whole book, a task that can be only very imperfectly

accomplished within its limits.

The historical titles of our subject may give us a hint towards the

beginning of such a definition. Many writers of the last century

called the philosophy of beauty _Criticism,_ and the word is still

retained as the title for the reasoned appreciation of works of art.

We could hardly speak, however, of delight in nature as criticism.

A sunset is not criticised; it is felt and enjoyed. The word

"criticism," used on such an occasion, would emphasize too much

the element of deliberate judgment and of comparison with

standards. Beauty, although often so described, is seldom so

perceived, and all the greatest excellences of nature and art are so

far from being approved of by a rule that they themselves furnish

the standard and ideal by which critics measure inferior effects.

This age of science and of nomenclature has accordingly adopted a

more learned word, _Aesthetics,_ that is, the theory of perception

or of susceptibility. If criticism is too narrow a word, pointing

exclusively to our more artificial judgments, aesthetics seems to be

too broad and to include within its sphere all pleasures and pains, if

not all perceptions whatsoever. Kant used it, as we know, for his

theory of time and space as forms of all perception; and it has at

times been narrowed into an equivalent for the philosophy of art.

If we combine, however, the etymological meaning of criticism

with that of aesthetics, we shall unite two essential qualities of the

theory of beauty. Criticism implies judgment, and aesthetics

perception. To get the common ground, that of perceptions which

are critical, or judgments which are perceptions, we must widen

our notion of deliberate criticism so as to include those judgments

of value which are instinctive and immediate, that is, to include

pleasures and pains; and at the same time we must narrow our

notion of aesthetics so as to exclude all perceptions which are not

appreciations, which do not find a value in their objects. We thus

reach the sphere of critical or appreciative perception, which is,

roughly speaking, what we mean to deal with. And retaining the

word "aesthetics," which is now current, we may therefore say that

aesthetics is concerned with the perception of values. The meaning

and conditions of value is, then, what we must first consider.

Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to

philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained

by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of

the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely

physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not

essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth

and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without

possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection

might have secured the survival of those automata which made

useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct of

self-preservation would have been developed, dangers would have been

shunned without being feared, and injuries revenged without being

felt.

In such a world there might have come to be the most perfect

organization. There would have been what we should call the

expression of the deepest interests and the apparent pursuit of

conceived goods. For there would have been spontaneous and

ingrained tendencies to avoid certain contingencies and to produce

others; all the dumb show and evidence of thinking would have

been patent to the observer. Yet there would surely have been no

thinking, no expectation, and no conscious achievement in the

whole process.

The onlooker might have feigned ends and objects of forethought,

as we do in the case of the water that seeks its own level, or in that

of the vacuum which nature abhors. But the particles of matter

would have remained unconscious of their collocation, and all

nature would have been insensible of their changing arrangement.

We only, the possible spectators of that process, by virtue of our

own interests and habits, could see any progress or culmination in

it. We should see culmination where the result attained satisfied

our practical or aesthetic demands, and progress wherever such a

satisfaction was approached. But apart from ourselves, and our

human bias, we can see in such a mechanical world no element of

value whatever. In removing consciousness, we have removed the

possibility of worth.

But it is not only in the absence of all consciousness that value

would be removed from the world; by a less violent abstraction

from the totality of human experience, we might conceive beings

of a purely intellectual cast, minds in which the transformations of

nature were mirrored without any emotion. Every event would then

be noted, its relations would be observed, its recurrence might even

be expected; but all this would happen without a shadow of desire,

of pleasure, or of regret. No event would be repulsive, no situation

terrible. We might, in a word, have a world of idea without a world

of will. In this case, as completely as if consciousness were absent

altogether, all value and excellence would be gone. So that for the

existence of good in any form it is not merely consciousness but

emotional consciousness that is needed. Observation will not do,

appreciation is required.

_Preference is ultimately irrational._

§ 2. We may therefore at once assert this axiom, important for all

moral philosophy and fatal to certain stubborn incoherences of

thought, that there is no value apart from some appreciation of it,

and no good apart from some preference of it before its absence or

its opposite. In appreciation, in preference, lies the root and

essence of all excellence. Or, as Spinoza clearly expresses it, we

desire nothing because it is good, but it is good only because we

desire it.

It is true that in the absence of an instinctive reaction we can still

apply these epithets by an appeal to usage. We may agree that an

action is bad, or a building good, because we recognize in them a

character which we have learned to designate by that adjective; but

unless there is in us some trace of passionate reprobation or of

sensible delight, there is no moral or aesthetic judgment. It is all a

question of propriety of speech, and of the empty titles of things.

The verbal and mechanical proposition, that passes for judgment of

worth, is the great cloak of ineptitude in these matters. Insensibility

is very quick in the conventional use of words. If we appealed

more often to actual feeling, our judgments would be more diverse,

but they would be more legitimate and instructive. Verbal

judgments are often useful instruments of thought, but it is not by

them that worth can ultimately be determined.

Values spring from the immediate and inexplicable reaction of

vital impulse, and from the irrational part of our nature. The

rational part is by its essence relative; it leads us from data to

conclusions, or from parts to wholes; it never furnishes the data

with which it works. If any preference or precept were declared to

be ultimate and primitive, it would thereby be declared to be

irrational, since mediation, inference, and synthesis are the essence

of rationality. The ideal of rationality is itself as arbitrary, as much

dependent on the needs of a finite organization, as any other ideal.

Only as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which the

philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In

spite of the verbal propriety of saying that reason demands

rationality, what really demands rationality, what makes it a good

and indispensable thing and gives it all its authority, is not its own

nature, but our need of it both in safe and economical action and in

the pleasures of comprehension.

It is evident that beauty is a species of value, and what we have

said of value in general applies to this particular kind. A first

approach to a definition of beauty has therefore been made by the

exclusion of all intellectual judgments, all judgments of matter of

fact or of relation. To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of

value, is a sign of a pedantic and borrowed criticism. If we

approach a work of art or nature scientifically, for the sake of its

historical connexions or proper classification, we do not approach

it aesthetically. The discovery of its date or of its author may be

otherwise interesting; it only remotely affects our aesthetic

appreciation by adding to the direct effect certain associations. If

the direct effect were absent, and the object in itself uninteresting,

the circumstances would be immaterial. Molière's _Misanthrope_

says to the court poet who commends his sonnet as written in a

quarter of an hour,

Voyons, monsieur, le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire,

and so we might say to the critic that sinks into the archaeologist,

show us the work, and let the date alone.

In an opposite direction the same substitution of facts for values

makes its appearance, whenever the reproduction of fact is made

the sole standard of artistic excellence. Many half-trained

observers condemn the work of some naïve or fanciful masters

with a sneer, because, as they truly say, it is out of drawing. The

implication is that to be correctly copied from a model is the

prerequisite of all beauty. Correctness is, indeed, an element of

effect and one which, in respect to familiar objects, is almost

indispensable, because its absence would cause a disappointment

and dissatisfaction incompatible with enjoyment. We learn to value

truth more and more as our love and knowledge of nature increase.

But fidelity is a merit only because it is in this way a factor in our

pleasure. It stands on a level with all other ingredients of effect.

When a man raises it to a solitary pre-eminence and becomes

incapable of appreciating anything else, he betrays the decay of

aesthetic capacity. The scientific habit in him inhibits the artistic.

That facts have a value of their own, at once complicates and

explains this question. We are naturally pleased by every

perception, and recognition and surprise are particularly acute

sensations. When we see a striking truth in any imitation, we are

therefore delighted, and this kind of pleasure is very legitimate,

and enters into the best effects of all the representative arts. Truth

and realism are therefore aesthetically good, but they are not

all-sufficient, since the representation of everything is not equally

pleasing and effective. The fact that resemblance is a source of

satisfaction justifies the critic in demanding it, while the aesthetic

insufficiency of such veracity shows the different value of truth in

science and in art. Science is the response to the demand for

information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but

the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for

the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into

it only as it subserves these ends.

Even the scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or

absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests.

As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts

by the painful process of selection, -- for intuition runs equally into

truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled

by experience, -- we gain vastly in our command over our

environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science, and

the fruit it is yielding in our day. We have no better vision of

nature and life than some of our predecessors, but we have greater

material resources. To know the truth about the composition and

history of things is good for this reason. It is also good because of

the enlarged horizon it gives us, because the spectacle of nature is

a marvellous and fascinating one, full of a serious sadness and

large peace, which gives us back our birthright as children of the

planet and naturalizes us upon the earth. This is the poetic value of

the scientific _Weltanschauung._ From these two benefits, the

practical and the imaginative, all the value of truth is derived.

Aesthetic and moral judgments are accordingly to be classed

together in contrast to judgments intellectual; they are both

judgments of value, while intellectual judgments are judgments of

fact. If the latter have any value, it is only derivative, and our

whole intellectual life has its only justification in its connexion

with our pleasures and pains.

_Contrast between moral and aesthetic values._

§ 3. The relation between aesthetic and moral judgments, between

the spheres of the beautiful and the good, is close, but the

distinction between them is important. One factor of this

distinction is that while aesthetic judgments are mainly positive,

that is, perceptions of good, moral judgments are mainly and

fundamentally negative, or perceptions of evil. Another factor of

the distinction is that whereas, in the perception of beauty, our

judgment is necessarily intrinsic and based on the character of the

immediate experience, and never consciously on the idea of an

eventual utility in the object, judgments about moral worth, on the

contrary, are always based, when they are positive, upon the

consciousness of benefits probably involved. Both these

distinctions need some elucidation.

Hedonistic ethics have always had to struggle against the moral

sense of mankind. Earnest minds, that feel the weight and dignity

of life, rebel against the assertion that the aim of right conduct is

enjoyment. Pleasure usually appears to them as a temptation, and

they sometimes go so far as to make avoidance of it a virtue. The

truth is that morality is not mainly concerned with the attainment

of pleasure; it is rather concerned, in all its deeper and more

authoritative maxims, with the prevention of suffering. There is

something artificial in the deliberate pursuit of pleasure; there is

something absurd in the obligation to enjoy oneself. We feel no

duty in that direction; we take to enjoyment naturally enough after

the work of life is done, and the freedom and spontaneity of our

pleasures is what is most essential to them.

The sad business of life is rather to escape certain dreadful evils to

which our nature exposes us, -- death, hunger, disease, weariness,

isolation, and contempt. By the awful authority of these things,

which stand like spectres behind every moral injunction,

conscience in reality speaks, and a mind which they have duly

impressed cannot but feel, by contrast, the hopeless triviality of the

search for pleasure. It cannot but feel that a life abandoned to

amusement and to changing impulses must run unawares into fatal

dangers. The moment, however, that society emerges from the

early pressure of the environment and is tolerably secure against

primary evils, morality grows lax. The forms that life will farther

assume are not to be imposed by moral authority, but are

determined by the genius of the race, the opportunities of the

moment, and the tastes and resources of individual minds. The

reign of duty gives place to the reign of freedom, and the law and

the covenant to the dispensation of grace.

The appreciation of beauty and its embodiment in the arts are

activities which belong to our holiday life, when we are redeemed

for the moment from the shadow of evil and the slavery to fear,

and are following the bent of our nature where it chooses to lead us.

The values, then, with which we here deal are positive; they were

negative in the sphere of morality. The ugly is hardly an exception,

because it is not the cause of any real pain. In itself it is rather a

source of amusement. If its suggestions are vitally repulsive, its

presence becomes a real evil towards which we assume a practical

and moral attitude. And, correspondingly, the pleasant is never, as

we hare seen, the object of a truly moral injunction.

_Work and play._

§ 4. We have here, then, an important element of the distinction

between aesthetic and moral values. It is the same that has been

pointed to in the famous contrast between work and play. These

terms may be used in different senses and their importance in

moral classification differs with the meaning attached to them. We

may call everything play which is useless activity, exercise that

springs from the physiological impulse to discharge the energy

which the exigencies of life have not called out. Work will then be

all action that is necessary or useful for life. Evidently if work and

play are thus objectively distinguished as useful and useless action,

work is a eulogistic term and play a disparaging one. It would be

better for us that all our energy should be turned to account, that

none of it should be wasted in aimless motion. Play, in this sense,

is a sign of imperfect adaptation. It is proper to childhood, when

the body and mind are not yet fit to cope with the environment, but

it is unseemly in manhood and pitiable in old age, because it marks

an atrophy of human nature, and a failure to take hold of the

opportunities of life.

Play is thus essentially frivolous. Some persons, understanding the

term in this sense, have felt an aversion, which every liberal mind

will share, to classing social pleasures, art, and religion under the

head of play, and by that epithet condemning them, as a certain

school seems to do, to gradual extinction as the race approaches

maturity. But if all the useless ornaments of our life are to be cut

off in the process of adaptation, evolution would impoverish

instead of enriching our nature. Perhaps that is the tendency of

evolution, and our barbarous ancestors amid their toils and wars,

with their flaming passions and mythologies, lived better lives than

are reserved to our well-adapted descendants.

We may be allowed to hope, however, that some imagination may

survive parasitically even in the most serviceable brain. Whatever

course history may take, -- and we are not here concerned with

prophecy, -- the question of what is desirable is not affected. To

condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are

useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life

irrespective of its content. For such a system the worthiest function

of the universe should be to establish perpetual motion.

Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is

done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their

own sake are their own justification.

At the same time there is an undeniable propriety in calling all the

liberal and imaginative activities of man play, because they are

spontaneous, and not carried on under pressure of external

necessity or danger. Their utility for self-preservation may be very

indirect and accidental, but they are not worthless for that reason.

On the contrary, we may measure the degree of happiness and

civilization which any race has attained by the proportion of its

energy which is devoted to free and generous pursuits, to the

adornment of life and the culture of the imagination. For it is in the

spontaneous play of his faculties that man finds himself and his

happiness. Slavery is the most degrading condition of which he is

capable, and he is as often a slave to the niggardness of the earth

and the inclemency of heaven, as to a master or an institution. He

is a slave when all his energy is spent in avoiding suffering and

death, when all his action is imposed from without, and no breath

or strength is left him for free enjoyment.

Work and play here take on a different meaning, and become

equivalent to servitude and freedom. The change consists in the

subjective point of view from which the distinction is now made.

We no longer mean by work all that is done usefully, but only what

is done unwillingly and by the spur of necessity. By play we are

designating, no longer what is done fruitlessly, but whatever is

done spontaneously and for its own sake, whether it have or not an

ulterior utility. Play, in this sense, may be our most useful

occupation. So far would a gradual adaptation to the environment

be from making this play obsolete, that it would tend to abolish

work, and to make play universal. For with the elimination of all

the conflicts and errors of instinct, the race would do

spontaneously whatever conduced to its welfare and we should live

safely and prosperously without external stimulus or restraint.

_All values are in one sense aesthetic._

§ 5. In this second and subjective sense, then, work is the

disparaging term and play the eulogistic one. All who feel the

dignity and importance of the things of the imagination, need not

hesitate to adopt the classification which designates them as play.

We point out thereby, not that they have no value, but that their

value is intrinsic, that in them is one of the sources of all worth.

Evidently all values must be ultimately intrinsic. The useful is

good because of the excellence of its consequences; but these must

somewhere cease to be merely useful in their turn, or only

excellent as means; somewhere we must reach the good that is

good in itself and for its own sake, else the whole process is futile,

and the utility of our first object illusory. We here reach the second

factor in our distinction, between aesthetic and moral values,

which regards their immediacy.

If we attempt to remove from life all its evils, as the popular

imagination has done at times, we shall find little but aesthetic

pleasures remaining to constitute unalloyed happiness. The

satisfaction of the passions and the appetites, in which we chiefly

place earthly happiness, themselves take on an aesthetic tinge

when we remove ideally the possibility of loss or variation. What

could the Olympians honour in one another or the seraphim

worship in God except the embodiment of eternal attributes, of

essences which, like beauty, make us happy only in contemplation?

The glory of heaven could not be otherwise symbolized than by

light and music. Even the knowledge of truth, which the most

sober theologians made the essence of the beatific vision, is an

aesthetic delight; for when the truth has no further practical utility,

it becomes a landscape. The delight of it is imaginative and the

value of it aesthetic.

This reduction of all values to immediate appreciations, to

sensuous or vital activities, is so inevitable that it has struck even

the minds most courageously rationalistic. Only for them, instead

of leading to the liberation of aesthetic goods from practical

entanglements and their establishment as the only pure and

positive values in life, this analysis has led rather to the denial of

all pure and positive goods altogether. Such thinkers naturally

assume that moral values are intrinsic and supreme; and since these

moral values would not arise but for the existence or imminence of

physical evils, they embrace the paradox that without evil no good

whatever is conceivable.

The harsh requirements of apologetics have no doubt helped them

to this position, from which one breath of spring or the sight of one

well-begotten creature should be enough to dislodge them. Their

ethical temper and the fetters of their imagination forbid them to

reconsider their original assumption and to conceive that morality

is a means and not an end; that it is the price of human

non-adaptation, and the consequence of the original sin of unfitness. It

is the compression of human conduct within the narrow limits of

the safe and possible. Remove danger, remove pain, remove the

occasion of pity, and the need of morality is gone. To say "thou

shalt not" would then be an impertinence.

But this elimination of precept would not be a cessation of life.

The senses would still be open, the instincts would still operate,

and lead all creatures to the haunts and occupations that befitted

them. The variety of nature and the infinity of art, with the

companionship of our fellows, would fill the leisure of that ideal

existence. These are the elements of our positive happiness, the

things which, amid a thousand vexations and vanities, make the

clear profit of living.

_Aesthetic consecration of general principles._

§ 6. Not only are the various satisfactions which morals are meant

to secure aesthetic in the last analysis, but when the conscience is

formed, and right principles acquire an immediate authority, our

attitude to these principles becomes aesthetic also. Honour,

truthfulness, and cleanliness are obvious examples. When the

absence of these virtues causes an instinctive disgust, as it does in

well-bred people, the reaction is essentially aesthetic, because it is

not based on reflection and benevolence, but on constitutional

sensitiveness. This aesthetic sensitiveness is, however, properly

enough called moral, because it is the effect of conscientious

training and is more powerful for good in society than laborious

virtue, because it is much more constant and catching. It is

Kalokagathia, the aesthetic demand for the morally good, and

perhaps the finest flower of human nature.

But this tendency of representative principles to become

independent powers and acquire intrinsic value is sometimes

mischievous. It is the foundation of the conflicts between

sentiment and justice, between intuitive and utilitarian morals.

Every human reform is the reassertion of the primary interests of

man against the authority of general principles which have ceased

to represent those interests fairly, but which still obtain the

idolatrous veneration of mankind. Nor are chivalry and religion

alone liable to fall into this moral superstition. It arises wherever

an abstract good is substituted for its concrete equivalent. The

miser's fallacy is the typical case, and something very like it is the

ethical principle of half our respectable population. To the exercise

of certain useful habits men come to sacrifice the advantage which

was the original basis and justification of those habits. Minute

knowledge is pursued at the expense of largeness of mind, and

riches at the expense of comfort and freedom.

This error is all the more specious when the derived aim has in

itself some aesthetic charm, such as belongs to the Stoic idea of

playing one's part in a vast drama of things, irrespective of any

advantage thereby accruing to any one; somewhat as the miser's

passion is rendered a little normal when his eye is fascinated not

merely by the figures of a bank account, but by the glitter of the

yellow gold. And the vanity of playing a tragic part and the glory

of conscious self-sacrifice have the same immediate fascination.

Many irrational maxims thus acquire a kind of nobility. An object

is chosen as the highest good which has not only a certain

representative value, but also an intrinsic one, -- which is not

merely a method for the realization of other values, but a value in

its own realization.

Obedience to God is for the Christian, as conformity to the laws of

nature or reason is for the Stoic, an attitude which has a certain

emotional and passionate worth, apart from its original justification

by maxims of utility. This emotional and passionate force is the

essence of fanaticism, it makes imperatives categorical, and gives

them absolute sway over the conscience in spite of their

one-sidedness and their injustice to the manifold demands of human

nature.

Obedience to God or reason can originally recommend itself to a

man only as the surest and ultimately least painful way of

balancing his aims and synthesizing his desires. So necessary is

this sanction even to the most impetuous natures, that no martyr

would go to the stake if he did not believe that the powers of nature,

in the day of judgment, would be on his side. But the human mind

is a turbulent commonwealth, and the laws that make for the

greatest good cannot be established in it without some partial

sacrifice, without the suppression of many particular impulses.

Hence the voice of reason or the command of God, which makes

for the maximum ultimate satisfaction, finds itself opposed by

sundry scattered and refractory forces, which are henceforth

denominated bad. The unreflective conscience, forgetting the

vicarious source of its own excellence, then assumes a solemn and

incomprehensible immediacy, as if its decrees were absolute and

intrinsically authoritative, not of to-day or yesterday, and no one

could tell whence they had arisen. Instinct can all the more easily

produce this mystification when it calls forth an imaginative

activity full of interest and eager passion. This effect is

conspicuous in the absolutist conscience, both devotional and

rationalistic, as also in the passion of love. For in all these a certain

individuality, definiteness, and exclusiveness is given to the

pursued object which is very favourable to zeal, and the heat of

passion melts together the various processes of volition into the

consciousness of one adorable influence.

However deceptive these complications may prove to men of

action and eloquence, they ought not to impose on the critic of

human nature. Evidently what value general goods do not derive

from the particular satisfactions they stand for, they possess in

themselves as ideas pleasing and powerful over the imagination.

This intrinsic advantage of certain principles and methods is none

the less real for being in a sense aesthetic. Only a sordid

utilitarianism that subtracts the imagination from human nature, or

at least slurs over its immense contribution to our happiness, could

fail to give these principles the preference over others practically

as good.

If it could be shown, for instance, that monarchy was as apt, in a

given case, to secure the public well-being as some other

form of government, monarchy should be preferred, and would

undoubtedly be established, on account of its imaginative and

dramatic superiority. But if, blinded by this somewhat ethereal

advantage, a party sacrificed to it important public interests, the

injustice would be manifest. In a doubtful case, a nation decides,

not without painful conflicts, how much it will sacrifice to its

sentimental needs. The important point is to remember that the

representative or practical value of a principle is one thing, and its

intrinsic or aesthetic value is another, and that the latter can be

justly counted only as an item in its favour to be weighed; against

possible external disadvantages. Whenever this comparison and

balancing of ultimate benefits of every kind is angrily dismissed in

favour of some absolute principle, laid down in contempt of human

misery and happiness, we have a personal and fantastic system of

ethics, without practical sanctions. It is an evidence that the

superstitious imagination has invaded the sober and practical

domain of morals.

_Aesthetic and physical pleasure._

§ 7. We have now separated with some care intellectual and moral

judgments from the sphere of our subject, and found that we are to

deal only with perceptions of value, and with these only when they

are positive and immediate. But even with these distinctions the

most remarkable characteristic of the sense of beauty remains

undefined. All pleasures are intrinsic and positive values, but all

pleasures are not perceptions of beauty. Pleasure is indeed the

essence of that perception, but there is evidently in this particular

pleasure a complication which is not present in others and which is

the basis of the distinction made by consciousness and language

between it and the rest. It will be instructive to notice the degrees

of this difference.

The bodily pleasures are those least resembling perceptions of

beauty. By bodily pleasures we mean, of course, more than

pleasures with a bodily seat; for that class would include them all,

as well as all forms and elements of consciousness. Aesthetic

pleasures have physical conditions, they depend on the activity of

the eye and the ear, of the memory and the other ideational

functions of the brain. But we do not connect those pleasures with

their seats except in physiological studies; the ideas with which

aesthetic pleasures are associated are not the ideas of their bodily

causes. The pleasures we call physical, and regard as low, on the

contrary, are those which call our attention to some part of our own

body, and which make no object so conspicuous to us as the organ

in which they arise.

There is here, then, a very marked distinction between physical and

aesthetic pleasure; the organs of the latter must be transparent, they

must not intercept our attention, but carry it directly to some

external object. The greater dignity and range of aesthetic pleasure

is thus made very intelligible. The soul is glad, as it were, to forget

its connexion with the body and to fancy that it can travel over the

world with the liberty with which it changes the objects of its

thought. The mind passes from China to Peru without any

conscious change in the local tensions of the body. This illusion of

disembodiment is very exhilarating, while immersion in the flesh

and confinement to some organ gives a tone of grossness

and selfishness to our consciousness. The generally meaner

associations of physical pleasures also help to explain their

comparative crudity.

_The differetia of aesthetic pleasure not its disinterestedness._

§ 8. The distinction between pleasure and the sense of beauty has

sometimes been said to consist in the unselfishness of aesthetic

satisfaction. In other pleasures, it is said, we gratify our senses and

passions; in the contemplation of beauty we are raised above

ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the

recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess. The painter

does not look at a spring of water with the eyes of a thirsty man,

nor at a beautiful woman with those of a satyr. The difference lies,

it is urged, in the impersonality of the enjoyment. But this

distinction is one of intensity and delicacy, not of nature, and it

seems satisfactory only to the least aesthetic minds.[1]

In the second place, the supposed disinterestedness of aesthetic

delights is not truly fundamental. Appreciation of a picture is not

identical with the desire to buy it, but it is, or ought to be, closely

related and preliminary to that desire. The beauties of nature and of

the plastic arts are not consumed by being enjoyed; they retain all

the efficacy to impress a second beholder. But this circumstance is

accidental, and those aesthetic objects which depend upon change

and are exhausted in time, as are all performances, are things the

enjoyment of which is an object of rivalry and is coveted as much

as any other pleasure. And even plastic beauties can often not be

enjoyed except by a few, on account of the necessity of travel or

other difficulties of access, and then this aesthetic enjoyment is as

selfishly pursued as the rest.

The truth which the theory is trying to state seems rather to be that

when we seek aesthetic pleasures we have no further pleasure in

mind; that we do not mix up the satisfactions of vanity and

proprietorship with the delight of contemplation. This is true, but it

is true at bottom of all pursuits and enjoyments. Every real

pleasure is in one sense disinterested. It is not sought with ulterior

motives, and what fills the mind is no calculation, but the image of

an object or event, suffused with emotion. A sophisticated

consciousness may often take the idea of self as the touchstone of

its inclinations; but this self, for the gratification and

aggrandizement of which a man may live, is itself only a complex

of aims and memories, which once had their direct objects, in

which he had taken a spontaneous and unselfish interest. The

gratifications which, merged together, make the selfishness are

each of them ingenuous, and no more selfish than the most

altruistic, impersonal emotion. The content of selfishness is a mass

of unselfishness. There is no reference to the nominal essence

called oneself either in one's appetites or in one's natural affections;

yet a man absorbed in his meat and drink, in his houses and lands,

in his children and dogs, is called selfish because these interests,

although natural and instinctive in him, are not shared by others.

The unselfish man is he whose nature has a more universal

direction, whose interests are more widely diffused.

But as impersonal thoughts are such only in their object, not in

their subject or agents, since, all thoughts are the thoughts of

somebody: so also unselfish interests have to be somebody's

interests. If we were not interested in beauty, if it were of no

concern to our happiness whether things were beautiful or ugly, we

should manifest not the maximum, but the total absence of

aesthetic faculty. The disinterestedness of this pleasure is, therefore,

that of all primitive and intuitive satisfactions, which are in no way

conditioned by a reference to an artificial general concept, like that

of the self, all the potency of which must itself be derived from the

independent energy of its component elements. I care about myself

because "myself" is a name for the things I have at heart. To set up

the verbal figment of personality and make it an object of concern

apart from the interests which were its content and substance, turns

the moralist into a pedant, and ethics into a superstition. The self

which is the object of _amour propre_ is an idol of the tribe, and

needs to be disintegrated into the primitive objective interests that

underlie it before the cultus of it can be justified by reason.

_The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its universality._

§ 9. The supposed disinterestedness of our love of beauty passes

into another characteristic of it often regarded as essential, -- its

universality. The pleasures of the senses have, it is said, no

dogmatism in them; that anything gives me pleasure involves no

assertion about its capacity to give pleasure to another. But when I

judge a thing to be beautiful, my judgment means that the thing is

beautiful in itself, or (what is the same thing more critically

expressed) that it should seem so to everybody. The claim to

universality is, according to this doctrine, the essence of the

aesthetic; what makes the perception of beauty a judgment rather

than a sensation. All aesthetic precepts would be impossible, and

all criticism arbitrary and subjective, unless we admit a paradoxical

universality in our judgment, the philosophical implications of

which we may then go on to develope. But we are fortunately not

required to enter the labyrinth into which this method leads; there

is a much simpler and clearer way of studying such questions,

which is to challenge and analyze the assertion before us and seek

its basis in human nature. Before this is done, we should run the

risk of expanding a natural misconception or inaccuracy of thought

into an inveterate and pernicious prejudice by making it the centre

of an elaborate construction.

That the claim of universality is such a natural inaccuracy will not

be hard to show. There is notoriously no great agreement upon

aesthetic matters; and such agreement as there is, is based upon

similarity of origin, nature, and circumstance among men, a

similarity which, where it exists, tends to bring about identity in all

judgments and feelings. It is unmeaning to say that what is

beautiful to one man _ought_ to be beautiful to another. If their

senses are the same, their associations and dispositions similar,

then the same thing will certainly be beautiful to both. If their

natures are different, the form which to one will be entrancing will

be to another even invisible, because his classifications and

discriminations in perception will be different, and he may see a

hideous detached fragment or a shapeless aggregate of things, in

what to another is a perfect whole -- so entirely are the unities of

function and use. It is absurd to say that what is invisible to a given

being _ought_ to seem beautiful to him. Evidently this obligation

of recognizing the same qualities is conditioned by the possession

of the same faculties. But no two men have exactly the same

faculties, nor can things have for any two exactly the same values.

What is loosely expressed by saying that any one ought to see this

or that beauty is that he would see it if his disposition, training, or

attention were what our ideal demands for him; and our ideal of

what any one should be has complex but discoverable sources. We

take, for instance, a certain pleasure in having our own judgments

supported by those of others; we are intolerant, if not of the

existence of a nature different from our own, at least of

its expression in words and judgments. We are confirmed or

made happy in our doubtful opinions by seeing them accepted

universally. We are unable to find the basis of our taste in our own

experience and therefore refuse to look for it there. If we were sure

of our ground, we should be willing to acquiesce in the naturally

different feelings and ways of others, as a man who is conscious of

speaking his language with the accent of the capital confesses its

arbitrariness with gayety, and is pleased and interested in the

variations of it he observes in provincials; but the provincial is

always zealous to show that he has reason and ancient authority to

justify his oddities. So people who have no sensations, and do not

know why they judge, are always trying to show that they judge by

universal reason.

Thus the frailty and superficiality of our own judgments cannot

brook contradiction. We abhor another man's doubt when we

cannot tell him why we ourselves believe. Our ideal of other men

tends therefore to include the agreement of their judgments with

our own; and although we might acknowledge the fatuity of this

demand in regard to natures very different from the human, we

may be unreasonable enough to require that all races should admire

the same style of architecture, and all ages the same poets.

The great actual unity of human taste within the range of

conventional history helps the pretension. But in principle it is

untenable. Nothing has less to do with the real merit of a work of

imagination than the capacity of all men to appreciate it; the true

test is the degree and kind of satisfaction it can give to him who

appreciates it most. The symphony would lose nothing if half

mankind had always been deaf, as nine-tenths of them actually are

to the intricacies of its harmonies; but it would have lost much if

no Beethoven had existed. And more: incapacity to appreciate

certain types of beauty may be the condition _sine qua non_ for the

appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for

enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and

hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant.

The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are

philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they

indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of

them that has grown into a jealous passion. The architects that have

pieced out the imperfections of ancient buildings with their own

thoughts, like Charles V. when he raised his massive palace beside

the Alhambra, may be condemned from a certain point of view.

They marred much by their interference; but they showed a

splendid confidence in their own intuitions, a proud assertion of

their own taste, which is the greatest evidence of aesthetic sincerity.

On the contrary, our own gropings, eclecticism, and archaeology

are the symptoms of impotence. If we were less learned and less

just, we might be more efficient. If our appreciation were less

general, it might be more real, and if we trained our imagination

into exclusiveness, it might attain to character.

_The differentia of aesthetic pleasure: its objectification._

§ 10. There is, however, something more in the claim to

universality in aesthetic judgments than the desire to generalize our

own opinions. There is the expression of a curious but well-known

psychological phenomenon, viz., the transformation of an element

of sensation into the quality of a thing. If we say that other men

should see the beauties we see, it is because _we_ think those

beauties _are in the object,_ like its colour, proportion, or size. Our

judgment appears to us merely the perception and discovery of an

external existence, of the real excellence that is without. But this

notion is radically absurd and contradictory. Beauty, as we have

seen, is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence

which affects our senses and which we consequently perceive. It

exists in perception, and cannot exist otherwise. A beautynot

perceived is a pleasure not felt, and a contradiction. But modern

philosophy has taught us to say the same thing of every element of

the perceived world; all are sensations; and their grouping into

objects imagined to be permanent and external is the work of

certain habits of our intelligence. We should be incapable of

surveying or retaining the diffused experiences of life, unless we

organized and classified them, and out of the chaos of impressions

framed the world of conventional and recognizable objects.

How this is done is explained by the current theories of perception.

External objects usually affect various senses at once, the

impressions of which are thereby associated. Repeated experiences

of one object are also associated on account of their similarity;

hence a double tendency to merge and unify into a single percept,

to which a name is attached, the group of those memories and

reactions which in fact had one external thing for their cause. But

this percept, once formed, is clearly different from those particular

experiences out of which it grew. It is permanent, they are variable.

They are but partial views and glimpses of it. The constituted

notion therefore comes to be the reality, and the materials of it

merely the appearance. The distinction between substance and

quality, reality and appearance, matter and mind, has no other

origin.

The objects thus conceived and distinguished from our ideas of

them, are at first compacted of all the impressions, feelings, and

memories, which offer themselves for association and fall within

the vortex of the amalgamating imagination. Every sensation we

get from a thing is originally treated as one of its qualities.

Experiment, however, and the practical need of a simpler

conception of the structure of objects lead us gradually to reduce

the qualities of the object to a minimum, and to regard most

perceptions as an effect of those few qualities upon us. These few

primary qualities, like extension which we persist in treating as

independently real and as the quality of a substance, are those

which suffice to explain the order of our experiences. All the rest,

like colour, are relegated to the subjective sphere, as merely effects

upon our minds, and apparent or secondary qualities of the object.

But this distinction has only a practical justification. Convenience

and economy of thought alone determine what combination of our

sensations we shall continue to objectify and treat as the cause of

the rest. The right and tendency to be objective is equal in all, since

they are all prior to the artifice of thought by which we separate the

concept from its materials, the thing from our experiences.

The qualities which we now conceive to belong to real objects are

for the moat part images of sight and touch. One of the first classes

of effects to be treated as secondary were naturally pleasures and

pains, since it could commonly conduce very little to intelligent

and successful action to conceive our pleasures and pains as

resident in objects. But emotions are essentially capable of

objectification, as well as impressions of sense; and one may well

believe that a primitive and inexperienced consciousness would

rather people the world with ghosts of its own terrors and passions

than with projections of those luminous and mathematical concepts

which as yet it could hardly have formed.

This animistic and mythological habit of thought still holds its own

at the confines of knowledge, where mechanical explanations are

not found. In ourselves, where nearness makes observation

difficult, in the intricate chaos of animal and human life, we still

appeal to the efficacy of will and ideas, as also in the remote night

of cosmic and religious problems. But in all the intermediate realm

of vulgar day, where mechanical science has made progress, the

inclusion of emotional or passionate elements in the concept of the

reality would be now an extravagance. Here our idea of things is

composed exclusively of perceptual elements, of the ideas of form

and of motion.

The beauty of objects, however, forms an exception to this rule.

Beauty is an emotional element, a pleasure of ours, which

nevertheless we regard as a quality of things. But we are now

prepared to understand the nature of this exception. It is the

survival of a tendency originally universal to make every effect of

a thing upon us a constituent of its conceived nature. The scientific

idea of a thing is a great abstraction from the mass of perceptions

and reactions which that thing produces the aesthetic idea is less

abstract, since it retains the emotional reaction, the pleasure of the

perception, as an integral part of the conceived thing.

Nor is it hard to find the ground of this survival in the sense of

beauty of an objectification of feeling elsewhere extinct. Most of

the pleasures which objects cause are easily distinguished and

separated from the perception of the object: the object has to be

applied to a particular organ, like the palate, or swallowed like

wine, or used and operated upon in some way before the pleasure

arises. The cohesion is therefore slight between the pleasure and

the other associated elements of sense; the pleasure is separated in

time from the perception, or it is localized in a different organ, and

consequently is at once recognized as an effect and not as a quality

of the object. But when the process of perception itself is pleasant,

as it may easily be, when the intellectual operation, by which the

elements of sense are associated and projected, and the concept of

the form and substance of the thing produced, is naturally

delightful, then we have a pleasure intimately bound up in the

thing, inseparable from its character and constitution, the seat of

which in us is the same as the seat of the perception. We naturally

fail, under these circumstances, to separate the pleasure from the

other objectified feelings. It becomes, like them, a quality of the

object, which we distinguish from pleasures not so incorporated in

the perception of things, by giving it the name of beauty.

_The definition of beauty._

§ 11. We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the

terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception,

is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical

language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.

This definition is intended to sum up a variety of distinctions and

identifications which should perhaps be here more explicitly set

down. Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of

fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional

and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give

pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever

indifferent is a contradiction in terms.

In the second place this value is positive, it is the sense of the

presence of something good, or (in the case of ugliness) of its

absence. It is never the perception of a positive evil, it is never a

negative value. That we are endowed with the sense of beauty is a

pure gain which brings no evil with it. When the ugly ceases to be

amusing or merely uninteresting and becomes disgusting, it

becomes indeed a positive evil: but a moral and practical, not an

aesthetic one. In aesthetics that saying is true -- often so

disingenuous in ethics -- that evil is nothing but the absence of

good: for even the tedium and vulgarity of an existence without

beauty is not itself ugly so much as lamentable and degrading. The

absence of aesthetic goods is a moral evil: the aesthetic evil is

merely relative, and means less of aesthetic good than was

expected at the place and time. No form in itself gives pain,

although some forms give pain by causing a shock of surprise even

when they are really beautiful: as if a mother found a fine bull pup

in her child's cradle, when her pain would not be aesthetic in its

nature.

Further, this pleasure must not be in the consequence of the utility

of the object or event, but in its immediate perception; in other

words, beauty is an ultimate good, something that gives

satisfaction to a natural function, to some fundamental need or

capacity of our minds. Beauty is therefore a positive value that is

intrinsic; it is a pleasure. These two circumstances sufficiently

separate the sphere of aesthetics from that of ethics. Moral values

are generally negative, and always remote. Morality has to do with

the avoidance of evil and the pursuit of good: aesthetics only with

enjoyment.

Finally, the pleasures of sense are distinguished from the

perception of beauty, as sensation in general is distinguished from

perception; by the objectification of the elements and their

appearance as qualities rather of things than of consciousness. The

passage from sensation to perception is gradual, and the path may

be sometimes retraced: so it is with beauty and the pleasures of

sensation. There is no sharp line between them, but it depends

upon the degree of objectivity my feeling has attained at the

moment whether I say "It pleases me," or "It is beautiful." If I am

self-conscious and critical, I shall probably use, one phrase; if I am

impulsive and susceptible, the other. The more remote, interwoven,

and inextricable the pleasure is, the more objective it will appear;

and the union of two pleasures often makes one beauty. In

Shakespeare's LIVth sonnet are these words:

O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem

By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

For that sweet odour which doth in it live.

The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye

As the perfumed tincture of the roses,

Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly

When summer's breath their masked buds discloses.

But, for their beauty only is their show,

They live unwooed and unrespected fade;

Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so:

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.

One added ornament, we see, turns the deep dye, which was but

show and mere sensation before, into an element of beauty and

reality, and as truth is here the co-operation of perceptions, so

beauty is the co-operation of pleasures. If colour, form, and motion

are hardly beautiful without the sweetness of the odour, how much

more necessary would they be for the sweetness itself to become a

beauty! If we had the perfume in a flask, no one would think of

calling it beautiful: it would give us too detached and controllable

a sensation. There would be no object in which it could be easily

incorporated. But let it float from the garden, and it will add

another sensuous charm to objects simultaneously recognized, and

help to make them beautiful. Thus beauty is constituted by the

objectification of pleasure. It is pleasure objectified.