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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sense of Beauty, by George Santayana
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Sense of Beauty
+       Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory
+
+Author: George Santayana
+
+Release Date: October 8, 2008 [EBook #26842]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SENSE OF BEAUTY ***
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY
+
+_All human functions may contribute to the sense of beauty._
+
+§ 12. Our task will now be to pass in review the various elements
+of our consciousness, and see what each contributes to the beauty
+of the world. We shall find that they do so whenever they are
+inextricably associated with the objectifying activity of the
+understanding. Whenever the golden thread of pleasure enters that
+web of things which our intelligence is always busily spinning, it
+lends to the visible world that mysterious and subtle charm which
+we call beauty.
+
+There is no function of our nature which cannot contribute
+something to this effect, but one function differs very much from
+another in the amount and directness of its contribution. The
+pleasures of the eye and ear, of the imagination and memory, are
+the most easily objectified and merged in ideas; but it would betray
+inexcusable haste and slight appreciation of the principle involved,
+if we called them the only materials of beauty. Our effort will
+rather be to discover its other sources, which have been more
+generally ignored, and point out their importance. For the five
+senses and the three powers of the soul, which play so large a part
+in traditional psychology, are by no means the only sources or
+factors of consciousness; they are more or less external divisions of
+its content, and not even exhaustive of that. The nature and
+changes of our life have deeper roots, and are controlled by less
+obvious processes.
+
+The human body is a machine that holds together by virtue of
+certain vital functions, on the cessation of which it is dissolved.
+Some of these, like the circulation of the blood, the growth and
+decay of the tissues, are at first sight unconscious. Yet any
+important disturbance of these fundamental processes at once
+produces great and painful changes in consciousness. Slight
+alterations are not without their conscious echo: and the whole
+temper and tone of our mind, the strength of our passions, the grip
+and concatenation of our habits, our power of attention, and the
+liveliness of our fancy and affections are due to the influence of
+these vital forces. They do not, perhaps, constitute the whole basis
+of any one idea or emotion: but they are the conditions of the
+existence and character of all.
+
+Particularly important are they for the _value_ of our experience.
+They constitute health, without which no pleasure can be pure.
+They determine our impulses in leisure, and furnish that surplus
+energy which we spend in play, in art, and in speculation. The
+attraction of these pursuits, and the very existence of an aesthetic
+sphere, is due to the efficiency and perfection of our vital processes.
+The pleasures which they involve are not exclusively bound to any
+particular object, and therefore do not account for the relative
+beauty of things. They are loose and unlocalized, having no special
+organ, or one which is internal and hidden within the body. They
+therefore remain undiscriminated in consciousness, and can serve
+to add interest to any object, or to cast a general glamour over the
+world, very favourable to its interest and beauty.
+
+The aesthetic value of vital functions differs according to their
+physiological concomitants: those that are favourable to ideation
+are of course more apt to extend something of their intimate
+warmth to the pleasures of contemplation, and thus to intensify the
+sense of beauty and the interest of thought. Those, on the other
+hand, that for physiological reasons tend to inhibit ideation, and to
+drown the attention in dumb and unrepresentable feelings, are less
+favourable to aesthetic activity. The double effect of drowsiness
+and reverie will illustrate this difference. The heaviness of sleep
+seems to fall first on the outer senses, and of course makes them
+incapable of acute impressions; but if it goes no further, it leaves
+the imagination all the freer, and by heightening the colours of the
+fancy, often suggests and reveals beautiful images. There is a kind
+of poetry and invention that comes only in such moments. In them
+many lovely melodies must first have been heard, and centaurs and
+angels originally imagined.
+
+If, however, the lethargy is more complete, or if the cause of it is
+such that the imagination is retarded while the senses remain
+awake, -- as is the case with an over-fed or over-exercised body, --
+we have a state of aesthetic insensibility. The exhilaration which
+comes with pure and refreshing air has a marked influence on our
+appreciations. To it is largely due the beauty of the morning, and
+the entirely different charm it has from the evening. The opposite
+state of all the functions here adds an opposite emotion to
+externally similar scenes, making both infinitely but differently
+beautiful.
+
+It would be curious and probably surprising to discover how much
+the pleasure of breathing has to do with our highest and most
+transcendental ideals. It is not merely a metaphor that makes us
+couple airiness with exquisiteness and breathlessness with awe; it
+is the actual recurrence of a sensation in the throat and lungs that
+gives those impressions an immediate power, prior to all reflection
+upon their significance. It is, therefore, to this vital sensation of
+deep or arrested respiration that the impressiveness of those objects
+is immediately due.
+
+_The influence of the passion of love._
+
+§ 13. Half-way between vital and social functions, lies the sexual
+instinct. If nature had solved the problem of reproduction without
+the differentiation of sex, our emotional life would have been
+radically different. So profound and, especially in woman, so
+pervasive an influence does this function exert, that we should
+betray an entirely unreal view of human nature if we did not
+inquire into the relations of sex with our aesthetic susceptibility.
+We must not expect, however, any great difference between man
+and woman in the scope or objects of aesthetic interest: what is
+important in emotional life is not which sex an animal has, but that
+it has sex at all. For if we consider the difficult problem which
+nature had to solve in sexual reproduction, and the nice adjustment
+of instinct which it demands, we shall see that the reactions and
+susceptibilities which must be implanted in the individual are for
+the most part identical in both sexes, as the sexual organization is
+itself fundamentally similar in both. Indeed, individuals of various
+species and the whole animal kingdom have the same sexual
+disposition, although, of course, the particular object destined to
+call forth the complete sexual reaction, differs with every species,
+and with each sex.
+
+If we were dealing with the philosophy of love, and not with that
+of beauty, our problem would be to find out by what machinery
+this fundamental susceptibility, common to all animals of both
+sexes, is gradually directed to more and more definite objects: first,
+to one species and one sex, and ultimately to one individual. It is
+not enough that sexual organs should be differentiated: the
+connexion must be established between them and the outer senses,
+so that the animal may recognize and pursue the proper object.
+
+The case of lifelong fidelity to one mate -- perhaps even to an
+unsatisfied and hopeless love -- is the maximum of differentiation,
+which even overleaps the utility which gave it a foothold in nature,
+and defeats its own object. For the differentiation of the instinct in
+respect to sex, age, and species is obviously necessary to its
+success as a device for reproduction. While this differentiation is
+not complete, -- and it often is not, -- there is a great deal of
+groping and waste; and the force and constancy of the instinct must
+make up for its lack of precision. A great deal of vital energy is
+thus absorbed by this ill-adjusted function. The most economical
+arrangement which can be conceived, would be one by which only
+the one female best fitted to bear offspring to a male should arouse
+his desire, and only so many times as it was well she should grow
+pregnant, thus leaving his energy and attention free at all other
+times to exercise the other faculties of his nature.
+
+If this ideal had been reached, the instinct, like all those perfectly
+adjusted, would tend to become unconscious; and we should miss
+those secondary effects with which we are exclusively concerned
+in aesthetics. For it is precisely from the waste, from the radiation
+of the sexual passion, that I beauty borrows warmth. As a harp,
+made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to every wind, so
+the nature of man, necessarily susceptible to woman, becomes
+simultaneously sensitive to other influences, and capable of
+tenderness toward every object. The capacity to love gives our
+contemplation that glow without which it might often fail to
+manifest beauty; and the whole sentimental side of our aesthetic
+sensibility -- without which it would be perceptive and
+mathematical rather than aesthetic -- is due to our sexual
+organization remotely stirred.
+
+The attraction of sex could not become efficient unless the senses
+were first attracted. The eye must be fascinated and the ear
+charmed by the object which nature intends should be pursued.
+Both sexes for this reason develope secondary sexual characteristics;
+and the sexual emotions are simultaneously extended to various
+secondary objects. The colour, the grace, the form, which
+become the stimuli of sexual passion, and the guides of
+sexual selection, acquire, before they can fulfil that office, a
+certain intrinsic charm. This charm is not only present for reasons
+which, in an admissible sense, we may call teleological, on account,
+that is, of its past utility in reproduction, but its intensity and power
+are due to the simultaneous stirring of profound sexual impulses.
+Not, of course, that any specifically sexual ideas are connected
+with these feelings: such ideas are absent in a modest and
+inexperienced mind even in the obviously sexual passions of love
+and jealousy.
+
+These secondary objects of interest, which are some of the most
+conspicuous elements of beauty, are to be called sexual for these
+two reasons: because the contingencies of the sexual function hare
+helped to establish them in our race, and because they owe their
+fascination in a great measure to the participation of our sexual life
+in the reaction which they cause.
+
+If any one were desirous to produce a being with a great
+susceptibility to beauty, he could not invent an instrument better
+designed for that object than sex. Individuals that need not unite
+for the birth and rearing of each generation, might retain a savage
+independence. For them it would not be necessary that any vision
+should fascinate, or that any languor should soften, the prying
+cruelty of the eye. But sex endows the individual with a dumb and
+powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually
+towards another; makes it one of the dearest employments of his
+life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the
+keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solitude an
+eternal melancholy.
+
+What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest
+meaning and beauty? The attention is fixed upon a well-defined
+object, and all the effects it produces in the mind are easily
+regarded as powers or qualities of that object. But these effects are
+here powerful and profound. The soul is stirred to its depths. Its
+hidden treasures are brought to the surface of consciousness. The
+imagination and the heart awake for the first time. All these new
+values crystallize about the objects then offered to the mind. If the
+fancy is occupied by the image of a single person, whose qualities
+have had the power of precipitating this revolution, all the values
+gather about that one image. The object becomes perfect, and we
+are said to be in love.[2] If the stimulus does not appear as a
+definite image, the values evoked are dispersed over the world, and
+we are said to have become lovers of nature, and to have
+discovered the beauty and meaning of things.
+
+To a certain extent this kind of interest will centre in the proper
+object of sexual passion, and in the special characteristics of the
+opposite sex; and we find accordingly that woman is the most
+lovely object to man, and man, if female modesty would confess it,
+the most interesting to woman. But the effects of so fundamental
+and primitive a reaction are much more general. Sex is not the only
+object of sexual passion. When love lacks its specific object, when
+it does not yet understand itself, or has been sacrificed to some
+other interest, we see the stifled fire bursting out in various
+directions. One is religious devotion, another is zealous
+philanthropy, a third is the fondling of pet animals, but not the least
+fortunate is the love of nature, and of art; for nature also is often a
+second mistress that consoles us for the loss of a first. Passion then
+overflows and visibly floods those neighbouring regions which it
+had always secretly watered. For the same nervous organization
+which sex involves, with its necessarily wide branchings and
+associations in the brain, must be partially stimulated by other
+objects than its specific or ultimate one especially in man, who,
+unlike some of the lower animals, has not his instincts clearly
+distinct and intermittent, but always partially active, and never
+active in isolation. We may say, then, that for man all nature is a
+secondary object of sexual passion, and that to this fact the beauty
+of nature is largely due.
+
+_Social instincts and their aesthetic influence._
+
+§ 14. The function of reproduction carries with it not only direct
+modifications of the body and mind, but a whole set of social
+institutions, for the existence of which social instincts and habits
+are necessary in man. These social feelings, the parental, the
+patriotic, or the merely gregarious, are not of much direct value for
+aesthetics, although, as is seen in the case of fashions, they are
+important in determining the duration and prevalence of a taste
+once formed.  Indirectly they are of vast importance and play a
+great rôle in arts like poetry, where the effect depends on what is
+signified more than on what is offered to sense. Any appeal to a
+human interest rebounds in favour of a work of art in which it is
+successfully made. That interest, unaesthetic in itself, helps to fix
+the attention and to furnish subject-matter and momentum to arts
+and modes of appreciation which are aesthetic. Thus comprehension
+of the passion of love is necessary to the appreciation of
+numberless songs, plays, and novels, and not a few works of
+musical and plastic art.
+
+The treatment of these matters must be postponed until we are
+prepared to deal with expression -- the most complex element of
+effect. It will suffice here to point out why social and gregarious
+impulses, in the satisfaction of which happiness mainly resides, are
+those in which beauty finds least support. This may help us to
+understand better the relations between aesthetics and _hedonics,_
+and the nature of that objectification in which we have placed the
+difference between beauty and pleasure.
+
+So long as happiness is conceived as a poet might conceive it,
+namely, in its immediately sensuous and emotional factors, so long
+as we live in the moment and make our happiness consist in the
+simplest things, -- in breathing, seeing, hearing, loving, and
+sleeping, -- our happiness has the same substance, the same
+elements, as our aesthetic delight, for it is aesthetic delight that
+makes our happiness. Yet poets and artists, with their immediate
+and aesthetic joys, are not thought to be happy men; they
+themselves are apt to be loud in their lamentations, and to regard
+themselves as eminently and tragically unhappy. This arises from
+the intensity and inconstancy of their emotions, from their
+improvidence, and from the eccentricity of their social habits.
+While among them the sensuous and vital functions have the upper
+hand, the gregarious and social instincts are subordinated and often
+deranged; and their unhappiness consists in the sense of their
+unfitness to live in the world into which they are born.
+
+But man is pre-eminently a political animal, and social needs are
+almost as fundamental in him as vital functions, and often more
+conscious. Friendship, wealth, reputation, power, and influence,
+when added to family life, constitute surely the main elements of
+happiness. Now these are only very partially composed of definite
+images of objects. The desire for them, the consciousness of their
+absence or possession, comes upon us only when we reflect, when
+we are planning, considering the future, gathering the words of
+others, rehearsing their scorn or admiration for ourselves,
+conceiving possible situations in which our virtue, our fame or
+power would become conspicuous, comparing our lot with that of
+others, and going through other discursive processes of thought.
+Apprehension, doubt, isolation, are things which come upon us
+keenly when we reflect upon our lives; they cannot easily become
+qualities of any object. If by chance they can, they acquire a great
+aesthetic value. For instance, "home," which in its social sense is a
+concept of happiness, when it becomes materialized in a cottage
+and a garden becomes an aesthetic concept, becomes a beautiful
+thing. The happiness is objectified, and the object beautified.
+
+Social objects, however, are seldom thus aesthetic, because they
+are not thus definitely imaginable. They are diffuse and abstract,
+and verbal rather than sensuous in their materials. Therefore the
+great emotions that go with them are not immediately transmutable
+into beauty. If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because
+happiness does not interest them. They cannot seriously pursue it,
+because its components are not components of beauty, and being in
+love with beauty, they neglect and despise those unaesthetic social
+virtues in the operation of which happiness is found. On the other
+hand those who pursue happiness conceived merely in the abstract
+and conventional terms, as money, success, or respectability, often
+miss that real and fundamental part of happiness which flows from
+the senses and imagination. This element is what aesthetics
+supplies to life; for beauty also can be a cause and a factor of
+happiness. Yet the happiness of loving beauty is either too
+sensuous to be stable, or else too ultimate, too sacramental, to be
+accounted happiness by the worldly mind.
+
+_The lower senses._
+
+§ 15. The senses of touch, taste, and smell, although capable no
+doubt of a great development, have not served in man for the
+purposes of intelligence so much as those of sight and hearing. It is
+natural that as they remain normally in the background of
+consciousness, and furnish the least part of our objectified ideas,
+the pleasures connected with them should remain also detached,
+and unused for the purpose of appreciation of nature. They have
+been called the unaesthetic, as well as the lower, senses; but the
+propriety of these epithets, which is undeniable, is due not to any
+intrinsic sensuality or baseness of these senses, but to the function
+which they happen to have in our experience. Smell and taste, like
+hearing, have the great disadvantage of not being intrinsically
+spatial: they are therefore not fitted to serve for the representation
+of nature, which allows herself to be accurately conceived only in
+spatial terms.[3] They have not reached, moreover, the same
+organization as sounds, and therefore cannot furnish any play of
+subjective sensation comparable to music in interest.
+
+The objectification of musical forms is due to their fixity and
+complexity: like words, they are thought of as existing in a social
+medium, and can be beautiful without being spatial. But tastes
+have never been so accurately or universally classified and
+distinguished; the instrument of sensation does not allow such nice
+and stable discriminations as does the ear. The art of combining
+dishes and wines, although one which everybody practises with
+more or less skill and attention, deals with a material far too
+unrepresentable to be called beautiful. The art remains in the
+sphere of the pleasant, and is consequently regarded as servile,
+rather than fine.
+
+Artists in life, if that expression may be used for those who have
+beautified social and domestic existence, have appealed
+continually to these lower senses. A fragrant garden, and savoury
+meats, incense, and perfumes, soft stuffs, and delicious colours,
+form our ideal of oriental luxuries, an ideal which appeals too
+much to human nature ever to lose its charm. Yet our northern
+poets have seldom attempted to arouse these images in their
+sensuous intensity, without relieving them by some imaginative
+touch. In Keats, for example, we find the following lines: --
+
+     And still she slept in azure-lidded sleep,
+     In blanched linen, smooth and lavendered,
+     While he from forth the closet brought a heap
+     Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd,
+     With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
+     And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon;
+     Manna and dates in argosy transferred
+     From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
+     From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
+
+Even the most sensuous of English poets, in whom the love of
+beauty is supreme, cannot keep long to the primal elements of
+beauty; the higher flight is inevitable for him. And how much does
+not the appeal to things in argosy transferred from Fez, reinforced
+with the reference to Samarcand and especially to the authorized
+beauties of the cedars of Lebanon, which even the Puritan may
+sing without a blush, add to our wavering satisfaction and
+reconcile our conscience to this unchristian indulgence of sense!
+
+But the time may be near when such scruples will be less common,
+and our poetry, with our other arts, will dwell nearer to the
+fountain-head of all inspiration. For if nothing not once in sense is
+to be found in the intellect, much less is such a thing to be found in
+the imagination. If the cedars of Lebanon did not spread a grateful
+shade, or the winds rustle through the maze of their branches, if
+Lebanon had never been beautiful to sense, it would not now be a
+fit or poetic subject of allusion. And the word "Fez" would be
+without imaginative value if no traveller had ever felt the
+intoxication of the torrid sun, the languors of oriental luxury, or,
+like the British soldier, cried amid the dreary moralities of his
+native land: --
+
+     Take me somewhere east of Suez
+          Where the best is like the worst,
+     Where there ain't no ten commandments
+          And a man may raise a thirst.
+
+Nor would Samarcand be anything but for the mystery of the
+desert and the picturesqueness of caravans, nor would an argosy be
+poetic if the sea had no voices and no foam, the winds and oars no
+resistance, and the rudder and taut sheets no pull. From these real
+sensations imagination draws its life, and suggestion its power.
+The sweep of the fancy is itself also agreeable; but the superiority
+of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety
+of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty
+of those that can at any time be felt.
+
+_Sound._
+
+§ 16. Sound shares with the lower senses the disadvantage of
+having no intrinsic spatial character; it, therefore, forms no part of
+the properly abstracted external world, and the pleasures of the ear
+cannot become, in the literal sense, qualities of _things._ But there
+is in sounds such an exquisite and continuous gradation in pitch,
+and such a measurable relation in length, that an object almost as
+complex and describable as the visible one can be built out of
+them. What gives spatial forms their value in description of
+the environment is the ease with which discriminations and
+comparisons can be made in spatial objects: they are measurable,
+while unspatial sensations commonly are not. But sounds are also
+measurable in their own category: they have comparable pitches
+and durations, and definite and recognizable combinations of those
+sensuous elements are as truly _objects_ as chairs and tables. Not
+that a musical composition exists in any mystical way, as a portion
+of the music of the spheres, which no one is hearing; but that, for a
+critical philosophy, visible objects are also nothing but possibilities
+of sensation. The real world is merely the shadow of that assurance
+of eventual experience which accompanies sanity. This objectivity
+can accrue to any mental figment that has enough cohesion,
+content, and individuality to be describable and recognizable, and
+these qualities belong no less to audible than to spatial ideas.
+
+There is, accordingly, some justification in Schopenhauer's
+speculative assertion that music repeats the entire world of sense,
+and is a parallel method of expression of the underlying substance,
+or will. The world of sound is certainly capable of infinite variety
+and, were our sense developed, of infinite extensions; and it has as
+much as the world of matter the power to interest us and to stir our
+emotions. It was therefore potentially as full of meaning. But it has
+proved the less serviceable and constant apparition; and, therefore,
+music, which builds with its materials, while the purest and most
+impressive of the arts, is the least human and instructive of them.
+
+The pleasantness of sounds has a simple physical basis. All
+sensations are pleasant only between certain limits of intensity; but
+the ear can discriminate easily between noises, that in themselves
+are uninteresting, if not annoying, and notes, which have an
+unmistakable charm. A sound is a note if the pulsations of the air
+by which it is produced recur at regular intervals. If there is no
+regular recurrence of waves, it is a noise. The rapidity of these
+regular beats determines the pitch of tones. That quality or
+_timbre_ by which one sound is distinguished from another of the
+same pitch and intensity is due to the different complications of
+waves in the air; the ability to discriminate the various waves in the
+vibrating air is, therefore, the condition of our finding music in it;
+for every wave has its period, and what we call a noise is a
+complication of notes too complex for our organs or our attention
+to decipher.
+
+We find here, at the very threshold of our subject, a clear instance
+of a conflict of principles which appears everywhere in aesthetics,
+and is the source and explanation of many conflicts of taste. Since
+a note is heard when a set of regular vibrations can be
+discriminated in the chaos of sound, it appears that the perception
+and value of this artistic element depends on abstraction, on the
+omission from the field of attention, of all the elements which do
+not conform to a simple law. This may be called the principle of
+purity. But if it were, the only principle at work, there would be no
+music more beautiful than the tone of a tuning-fork. Such sounds,
+although delightful perhaps to a child, are soon tedious. The
+principle of purity must make some compromise with another
+principle, which we may call that of interest. The object must have
+enough variety and expression to hold our attention for a while,
+and to stir our nature widely.
+
+As we are more acutely sensitive to results or to processes, we find
+the most agreeable effect nearer to one or to the other of these
+extremes of a tedious beauty or of an unbeautiful expressiveness.
+But these principles, as is clear, are not coordinate. The child who
+enjoys his rattle or his trumpet has aesthetic enjoyment, of
+however rude a kind; but the master of technique who should give
+a performance wholly without sensuous charm would be a gymnast
+and not a musician, and the author whose novels and poems should
+be merely expressive, and interesting only by their meaning and
+moral, would be a writer of history or philosophy, but not an artist.
+The principle of purity is therefore essential to aesthetic effect, but
+the principle of interest is subsidiary, and if appealed to alone
+would fail to produce beauty.
+
+The distinction, however, is not absolute: for the simple sensation
+is itself interesting, and the complication, if it is appreciable by
+sense and does not require discursive thought to grasp it, is itself
+beautiful. There may be a work of art in which the sensuous
+materials are not pleasing, as a discourse without euphony, if the
+structure and expression give delight; and there may be an
+interesting object without perceived structure, like musical notes,
+or the blue sky. Perfection would, of course, lie in the union of
+elements all intrinsically beautiful, in forms also intrinsically so;
+but where this is impossible, different natures prefer to sacrifice
+one or the other advantage.
+
+_Colour._
+
+§ 17. In the eye we have an organ so differentiated that it is
+sensitive to a much more subtle influence than even that of air
+waves. There seems to be, in the interstellar spaces, some
+pervasive fluid, for the light of the remotest star is rapidly
+conveyed to us, and we can hardly understand how this radiation of
+light, which takes place beyond our atmosphere, could be realized
+without some medium. This hypothetical medium we call the ether.
+It is capable of very rapid vibrations, which are propagated in all
+directions, like the waves of sound, only much more quickly.
+Many common observations, such as the apparent interval between
+lightning and thunder, make us aware of the quicker motion of
+light. Now, since nature was filled with this responsive fluid,
+which propagated to all distances vibrations originating at any
+point, and moreover as these vibrations, when intercepted by a
+solid body, were reflected wholly or in part, it obviously became
+very advantageous to every animal to develope an organ sensitive
+to these vibrations -- sensitive, that is, to light. For this would give
+the mind instantaneous impressions dependent upon the presence
+and nature of distant objects.
+
+To this circumstance we must attribute the primacy of sight in our
+perception, a primacy that makes light the natural symbol of
+knowledge. When the time came for our intelligence to take the
+great metaphysical leap, and conceive its content as permanent and
+independent, or, in other words, to imagine _things,_ the idea of
+these _things_ had to be constructed out of the materials already
+present to the mind. But the fittest material for such construction
+was that furnished by the eye, since it is the eye that brings us into
+widest relations with our actual environment, and gives us the
+quickest warning of approaching impressions. Sight has a
+prophetic function. We are less interested in it for itself than for the
+suggestion it brings of what may follow after. Sight is a method of
+presenting psychically what is practically absent; and as the
+essence of the _thing_ is its existence in our absence, the _thing_ is
+spontaneously conceived in terms of sight.
+
+Sight is, therefore, perception _par excellence,_ since we become
+most easily aware of objects through visual agency and in visual
+terms. Now, as the values of perception are those we call aesthetic,
+and there could be no beauty if there was no conception of
+independent objects, we may expect to find beauty derived mainly
+from the pleasures of sight. And, in fact, form, which is almost a
+synonym of beauty, is for us usually something visible: it is a
+synthesis of the seen. But prior to the effect of form, which arises
+in the constructive imagination, comes the effect of colour; this is
+purely sensuous, and no better intrinsically than the effects of any
+other sense: but being more involved in the perception of objects
+than are the rest, it becomes more readily an element of beauty.
+
+The values of colours differ appreciably and have analogy to the
+differing values of other sensations. As sweet or pungent smells, as
+high and low notes, or major and minor chords, differ from each
+other by virtue of their different stimulation of the senses, so also
+red differs from green, and green from violet. There is a nervous
+process for each, and consequently a specific value. This emotional
+quality has affinity to the emotional quality of other sensations; we
+need not be surprised that the high rate of vibration which yields a
+sharp note to the ear should involve somewhat the same feeling
+that is produced by the high rate of vibration which, to the eye,
+yields a violet colour. These affinities escape many minds; but it is
+conceivable that the sense of them should be improved by accident
+or training. There are certain effects of colour which give all men
+pleasure, and others which jar, almost like a musical discord. A
+more general development of this sensibility would make possible
+a new abstract art, an art that should deal with colours as music
+does with sound.
+
+We have not studied these effects, however, with enough attention,
+we have not allowed them to penetrate enough into the soul, to
+think them very significant. The stimulation of fireworks, or of
+kaleidoscopic effects, seems to us trivial. But everything which has
+a varied content has a potentiality of form and also of meaning.
+The form will be enjoyed as soon as attention accustoms us to
+discriminate and recognize its variations; and meaning will accrue
+to it, when the various emotional values of these forms ally the
+new object to all other experiences which involve similar emotions,
+and thus give it a sympathetic environment in the mind. The
+colours of the sunset have a brilliancy that attracts attention, and a
+softness and illusiveness that enchant the eye; while the many
+associations of the evening and of heaven gather about this kindred
+charm and deepen it. Thus the most sensuous of beauties can be
+full of sentimental suggestion. In stained glass, also, we have an
+example of masses of colour made to exert their powerful direct
+influence, to intensify an emotion eventually to be attached to very
+ideal objects; what is in itself a gorgeous and unmeaning ornament,
+by its absolute impressiveness becomes a vivid symbol of those
+other ultimates which have a similar power over the soul.
+
+_Materials surveyed._
+
+§ 18. We have now gone over those organs of perception that give
+us the materials out of which we construct objects, and mentioned
+the most conspicuous pleasures which, as they arise from those
+organs, are easily merged in the ideas furnished by the same. We
+have also noticed that these ideas, conspicuous as they are in our
+developed and operating consciousness, are not so much factors in
+our thought, independent contributors to it, as they are
+discriminations and excisions in its content, which, after they are
+all made, leave still a background of vital feeling. For the outer
+senses are but a portion of our sensorium, and the ideas of each, or
+of all together, but a portion of our consciousness.
+
+The pleasures which accompany ideation we have also found to be
+unitary and vital; only just as for practical purposes it is necessary
+to abstract and discriminate the contribution of one sense from that
+of another, and thus to become aware of particular and definable
+impressions, so it is natural that the diffused emotional tone of the
+body should also be divided, and a certain modicum of pleasure or
+pain should be attributed to each idea. Our pleasures are thus
+described as the pleasures of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight,
+and may become elements of beauty at the same time as the ideas
+to, which they are attached become elements of objects. There is,
+however, a remainder of emotion as there is a remainder of
+sensation; and the importance of this remainder -- of the continuum
+in which lie all particular pleasures and pains -- was insisted upon
+in the beginning.
+
+The beauty of the world, indeed, cannot be attributed wholly or
+mainly to pleasures thus attached to abstracted sensations. It is
+only the beauty of the materials of things which is drawn from the
+pleasures of sensation. By far the most important effects are not
+attributable to these materials, but to their arrangement and their
+ideal relations. We have yet to study those processes of our mind
+by which this arrangement and these relations are conceived; and
+the pleasures which we can attach to these processes may then be
+added to the pleasures attached to sense as further and more subtle
+elements of beauty.
+
+But before passing to the consideration of this more intricate
+subject, we may note that however subordinate the beauty may be
+which a garment, a building, or a poem derives from its sensuous
+material, yet the presence of this sensuous material is indispensable.
+Form cannot be the form of nothing. If, then, in finding or creating
+beauty, we ignore the materials of things, and attend only to their
+form, we miss an ever-present opportunity to heighten our effects.
+For whatever delight the form may bring, the material might have
+given delight already, and so much would have been gained
+towards the value of the total result.
+
+Sensuous beauty is not the greatest or most important element of
+effect, but it is the most primitive and fundamental, and the most
+universal. There is no effect of form which an effect of material
+could not enhance, and this effect of material, underlying that of
+form, raises the latter to a higher power and gives the beauty of the
+object a certain poignancy, thoroughness, and infinity which it
+otherwise would have lacked. The Parthenon not in marble, the
+king's crown not of gold, and the stars not of fire, would be feeble
+and prosaic things. The greater hold which material beauty has
+upon the senses, stimulates us here, where the form is also sublime,
+and lifts and intensifies our emotions. We need this stimulus if our
+perceptions are to reach the highest pitch of strength and acuteness.
+Nothing can be ravishing that is not beautiful pervasively.
+
+And another point. The wider diffusion of sensuous beauty makes
+it as it were the poor man's good. Fewer factors are needed to
+produce it and less training to appreciate it. The senses are
+indispensable instruments of labour, developed by the necessities
+of life; but their perfect development produces a harmony between
+the inward structure and instinct of the organ and the outward
+opportunities for its use; and this harmony is the source of
+continual pleasures. In the sphere of sense, therefore, a certain
+cultivation is inevitable in man; often greater, indeed, among
+rude peoples, perhaps among animals, than among those whose
+attention takes a wider sweep and whose ideas are more abstract.
+Without requiring, therefore, that a man should rise above his
+station, or develope capacities which his opportunities will seldom
+employ, we may yet endow his life with aesthetic interest, if we
+allow him the enjoyment of sensuous beauty. This enriches him
+without adding to his labour, and flatters him without alienating
+him from his world.
+
+Taste, when it is spontaneous, always begins with the senses.
+Children and savages, as we are so often told, delight in bright and
+variegated colours; the simplest people appreciate the neatness of
+muslin curtains, shining varnish, and burnished pots. A rustic
+garden is a shallow patchwork of the liveliest flowers, without that
+reserve and repose which is given by spaces and masses. Noise and
+vivacity is all that childish music contains, and primitive songs add
+little more of form than what is required to compose a few
+monotonous cadences.  These limitations are not to be regretted;
+they are a proof of sincerity.  Such simplicity is not the absence of
+taste, but the beginning of it.
+
+A people with genuine aesthetic perceptions creates traditional
+forms and expresses the simple pathos of its life, in unchanging but
+significant themes, repeated by generation after generation. When
+sincerity is lost, and a snobbish ambition is substituted bad taste
+comes in. The essence of it is a substitution of non-aesthetic for
+aesthetic values. To love glass beads because they are beautiful is
+barbarous, perhaps, but not vulgar; to love jewels only because
+they are dear is vulgar, and to betray the motive by placing them
+ineffectively is an offence against taste. The test is always the same:
+Does the thing itself actually please? If it does, your taste is real; it
+may be different from that of others, but is equally justified and
+grounded in human nature. If it does not, your whole judgment is
+spurious, and you are guilty, not of heresy, which in aesthetics is
+orthodoxy itself, but of hypocrisy, which is a self-excommunication
+from its sphere.
+
+Now, a great sign of this hypocrisy is insensibility to sensuous
+beauty. When people show themselves indifferent to primary and
+fundamental effects, when they are incapable of finding pictures
+except in frames or beauties except in the great masters, we may
+justly suspect that they are parrots, and that their verbal and
+historical knowledge covers a natural lack of aesthetic sense.
+Where, on the contrary, insensibility to higher forms of beauty
+does not exclude a natural love of the lower, we have every reason
+to be encouraged; there is a true and healthy taste, which only
+needs experience to refine it. If a man demands light, sound, and
+splendour, he proves that he has the aesthetic equilibrium; that
+appearances as such interest him, and that he can pause in
+perception to enjoy. We have but to vary his observation, to
+enlarge his thought, to multiply his discriminations -- all of which
+education can do -- and the same aesthetic habit will reveal to him
+every shade of the fit and fair. Or if it should not, and the man,
+although sensuously gifted, proved to be imaginatively dull, at
+least he would not have failed to catch an intimate and wide-spread
+element of effect. The beauty of material is thus the groundwork of
+all higher beauty, both in the object, whose form and meaning have
+to be lodged in something sensible, and in the mind, where
+sensuous ideas, being the first to emerge, are the first that can
+arouse delight.
+
+
+PART III
+
+FORM
+
+_There is a beauty of form._
+
+§ 19. The most remarkable and characteristic problem of aesthetics
+is that of beauty of form. Where there is a sensuous delight, like
+that of colour, and the impression of the object is in its elements
+agreeable, we have to look no farther for an explanation of the
+charm we feel. Where there is expression, and an object indifferent
+to the senses is associated with other ideas which are interesting,
+the problem, although complex and varied, is in principle
+comparatively plain. But there is an intermediate effect which is
+more mysterious, and more specifically an effect of beauty. It is
+found where sensible elements, by themselves indifferent, are so
+united as to please in combination. There is something unexpected
+in this phenomenon, so much so that those who cannot conceive its
+explanation often reassure themselves by denying its existence. To
+reduce beauty of form, however, to beauty of elements would not
+be easy, because the creation and variation of effect, by changing
+the relation of the simplest lines, offers too easy an experiment in
+refutation. And it would, moreover, follow to the comfort of the
+vulgar that all marble houses are equally beautiful.
+
+To attribute beauty of form to expression is more plausible. If I
+take the meaningless short lines in the figure and arrange them in
+the given ways, intended to represent the human face, there appear
+at once notably different aesthetic values.
+
+[Illustration of long and short lines]
+
+[Illustration of lines arranged into three facial profiles]
+
+Two of the forms are differently grotesque and one approximately
+beautiful. Now these effects are due to the expression of the lines;
+not only because they make one think of fair or ugly faces, but
+because, it may be said, these faces would in reality be fair or ugly
+according to their expression, according to the vital and moral
+associations of the different types.
+
+Nevertheless, beauty of form cannot be reduced to expression
+without denying the existence of immediate aesthetic values
+altogether, and reducing them all to suggestions of moral good. For
+if the object expressed by the form, and from which the form
+derives its value, had itself beauty of form, we should not advance;
+we must come somewhere to the point where the expression is of
+something else than beauty; and this something else would of
+course be some practical or moral good. Moralists are fond of such
+an interpretation, and it is a very interesting one. It puts beauty in
+the same relation to morals in which morals stand to pleasure and
+pain; both would be intuitions, qualitatively new, but with the same
+materials; they would be new perspectives of the same object.
+
+But this theory is actually inadmissible. Innumerable aesthetic
+effects, indeed all specific and unmixed ones, are direct
+transmutations of pleasures and pains; they express nothing
+extrinsic to themselves, much less moral excellences. The detached
+lines of our figure signify nothing, but they are not absolutely
+uninteresting; the straight line is the simplest and not the least
+beautiful of forms. To say that it owes its interest to the thought of
+the economy of travelling over the shortest road, or of other
+practical advantages, would betray a feeble hold on psychological
+reality. The impression of a straight line differs in a certain almost
+emotional way from that of a curve, as those of various curves do
+from one another. The quality of the sensation is different, like that
+of various colours or sounds. To attribute the character of these
+forms to association would be like explaining sea-sickness as the
+fear of shipwreck. There is a distinct quality and value, often a
+singular beauty, in these simple lines that is intrinsic in the
+perception of their form.
+
+It would be pedantic, perhaps, anywhere but in a treatise on
+aesthetics, to deny to this quality the name of expression; we might
+commonly say that the circle has one expression and the oval
+another. But what does the circle express except circularity, or the
+oval except the nature of the ellipse? Such expression _expresses_
+nothing; it is really impression. There may be analogy between it
+and other impressions; we may admit that odours, colours, and
+sounds correspond, and may mutually suggest one another; but this
+analogy is a superadded charm felt by very sensitive natures, and
+does not constitute the original value of the sensations. The
+common emotional tinge is rather what enables them to suggest
+one another, and what makes them comparable. Their expression,
+such as it is, is therefore due to the accident that both feelings have
+a kindred quality; and this quality has its effectiveness for sense
+independently of the perception of its recurrence in a different
+sphere. We shall accordingly take care to reserve the term
+"expression" for the suggestion of some other and assignable
+object, from which the expressive thing borrows an interest; and
+we shall speak of the intrinsic quality of forms as their emotional
+tinge or specific value.
+
+_Physiology of the perception of form._
+
+§ 20. The charm of a line evidently consists in the relation of its
+parts; in order to understand this interest in spatial relations, we
+must inquire how they are perceived.[4] If the eye had its sensitive
+surface, the retina, exposed directly to the light, we could never
+have a perception of form any more than in the nose or ear, which
+also perceive the object through media. When the perception is not
+through a medium, but direct, as in the case of the skin, we might
+get a notion of form, because each point of the object would excite
+a single point in the skin, and as the sensations in different parts of
+the skin differ in quality, a manifold of sense, in which
+discrimination of parts would be involved, could be presented to
+the mind. But when the perception is through a medium, a
+difficulty arises.
+
+Any point, a, in the object will send a ray to every point, _a', b',
+c',_ of the sensitive surface; every point of the retina will therefore
+be similarly affected, since each will receive rays from every part
+of the object.
+
+[Illustration of light rays]
+
+If all the rays from one point of the object, a, are to be concentrated
+on a corresponding point of the retina, a which would then
+become the exclusive representative of a, we must have one or
+more refracting surfaces interposed, to gather the rays together.
+The presence of the lens, with its various coatings, has made
+representation of point by point possible for the eye. The absence
+of such an instrument makes the same sort of representation
+impossible to other senses, such as the nose, which does not smell
+in one place the effluvia of one part of the environment and in
+another place the effluvia of another, but smells indiscriminately
+the combination of all. Eyes without lenses like those possessed by
+some animals, undoubtedly give only a consciousness of diffused
+light, without the possibility of boundaries or divisions in the field
+of view. The abstraction of colour from form is therefore by no
+means an artificial one, since, by a simplification of the organ of
+sense, one may be perceived without the other.
+
+But even if the lens enables the eye to receive a distributed image
+of the object, the manifold which consciousness would perceive
+would not be necessarily a manifold of parts juxtaposed in space.
+Bach point of the retina might send to the brain a detached
+impression; these might be comparable, but not necessarily in their
+spatial position. The ear sends to the brain such a manifold of
+impressions (since the ear also has an apparatus by which various
+external differences in rapidity of vibrations are distributed into
+different parts of the organ). But this discriminated manifold is a
+manifold of pitches, not of positions. How does it happen that the
+manifold conveyed by the optic nerve appears in consciousness as
+spatial, and that the relation between its elements is seen as a
+relation of position?
+
+An answer to this question has been suggested by various
+psychologists. The eye, by an instinctive movement, turns so as to
+bring every impression upon that point of the retina, near its centre,
+which has the acutest sensibility. A series of muscular sensations
+therefore always follows upon the conspicuous excitement of any
+outlying point. The object, as the eye brings it to the centre of
+vision, excites a series of points upon the retina; and the local sign,
+or peculiar quality of sensation, proper to each of these spots, is
+associated with that series of muscular feelings involved in turning
+the eyes. These feelings henceforth revive together; it is enough
+that a point in the periphery of the retina should receive a ray, for
+the mind to feel, together with that impression, the suggestion of a
+motion, and of the line of points that lies between the excited point
+and the centre of vision. A network of associations is thus formed,
+whereby the sensation of each retinal point is connected with all
+the others in a manner which is that of points in a plane. Every
+visible point becomes thus a point in a field, and has a felt
+radiation of lines of possible motion about it. Our notion of visual
+space has this origin, since the manifold of retinal impressions is
+distributed in a manner which serves as the type and exemplar of
+what we mean by a surface.
+
+_Values of geometrical figures._
+
+§ 21. The reader will perhaps pardon these details and the strain
+they put on his attention, when he perceives how much they help
+us to understand the value of forms. The sense, then, of the
+position of any point consists in the tensions in the eye, that not
+only tends to bring that point to the centre of vision, but feels the
+suggestion of all the other points which are related to the given one
+in the web of visual experience. The definition of space as the
+possibility of motion is therefore an accurate and significant one,
+since the most direct and native perception of space we can have is
+the awakening of many tendencies to move our organs.
+
+For example, if a circle is presented, the eye will fall upon its
+centre, as to the centre of gravity, as it were, of the balanced
+attractions of all the points; and there will be, in that position, an
+indifference and sameness of sensation, in whatever direction some
+accident moves the eye, that accounts very well for the emotional
+quality of the circle. It is a form which, although beautiful in its
+purity and simplicity, and wonderful in its continuity, lacks any
+stimulating quality, and is often ugly in the arts, especially when
+found in vertical surfaces where it is not always seen in perspective.
+For horizontal surfaces it is better because it is there always an
+ellipse to vision, and the ellipse has a less dull and stupefying
+effect. The eye can move easily, organize and subordinate its parts,
+and its relations to the environment are not similar in all directions.
+Small circles, like buttons, are not in the same danger of becoming
+ugly, because the eye considers them as points, and they diversify
+and help to divide surfaces, without appearing as surfaces
+themselves.
+
+The straight line offers a curious object for analysis. It is not for
+the eye a very easy form to grasp. We bend it or we leave it.
+Unless it passes through the centre of vision, it is obviously a
+tangent to the points which have analogous relations to that centre.
+The local signs or tensions of the points in such a tangent vary in
+an unseizable progression; there is violence in keeping to it, and
+the effect is forced. This makes the dry and stiff quality of any long
+straight line, which the skilful Greeks avoided by the curves of
+their columns and entablatures, and the less economical barbarians
+by a profusion of interruptions and ornaments.
+
+The straight line, when made the direct object of attention, is, of
+course, followed by the eye and not seen by the outlying parts of
+the retina in one eccentric position. The same explanation is good
+for this more common case, since the consciousness that the eye
+travels in a straight line consists in the surviving sense of the
+previous position, and in the manner in which the tensions of these
+various positions overlap. If the tensions change from moment to
+moment entirely, we have a broken, a fragmentary effect, as that of
+zigzag, where all is dropping and picking up again of associated
+motions; in the straight line, much prolonged, we have a gradual
+and inexorable rending of these tendencies to associated
+movements.
+
+In the curves we call flowing and graceful, we have, on the
+contrary, a more natural and rhythmical set of movements in the
+optic muscles; and certain points in the various gyrations make
+rhymes and assonances, as it were, to the eye that reaches them.
+We find ourselves at every turn reawakening, with a variation, the
+sense of the previous position. It is easy to understand by analogy
+with the superficially observed conditions of pleasure, that such
+rhythms and harmonies should be delightful. The deeper question
+of the physical basis of pleasure we have not intended to discuss.
+Suffice it that measure, in quantity, in intensity, and in time, must
+involve that physiological process, whatever it may be, the
+consciousness of which is pleasure.
+
+_Symmetry._
+
+§ 22. An important exemplification of these physiological
+principles is found in the charm of symmetry. When for any reason
+the eye is to be habitually directed to a single point, as to the
+opening of a gate or window, to an altar, a throne, a stage, or a
+fireplace, there will be violence and distraction caused by the
+tendency to look aside in the recurring necessity of looking
+forward, if the object is not so arranged that the tensions of eye are
+balanced, and the centre of gravity of vision lies in the point which
+one is obliged to keep in sight. In all such objects we therefore
+require bilateral symmetry. The necessity of vertical symmetry is
+not felt because the eyes and head do not so readily survey objects
+from top to bottom as from side to side. The inequality of the upper
+and lower parts does not generate the same tendency to motion, the
+same restlessness, as does the inequality of the right and left sides
+of an object in front of us. The comfort and economy that comes
+from muscular balance in the eye, is therefore in some cases the
+source of the value of symmetry.[5]
+
+In other cases symmetry appeals to us through the charm of
+recognition and rhythm. When the eye runs over a facade, and
+finds the objects that attract it at equal intervals, an expectation,
+like the anticipation of an inevitable note or requisite word, arises
+in the mind, and its non-satisfaction involves a shock. This shock,
+if caused by the emphatic emergence of an interesting object, gives
+the effect of the picturesque; but when it comes with no
+compensation, it gives us the feeling of ugliness and imperfection
+-- the defect which symmetry avoids. This kind of symmetry is
+accordingly in itself a negative merit, but often the condition of the
+greatest of all merits, -- the permanent power to please. It
+contributes to that completeness which delights without
+stimulating, and to which our jaded senses return gladly, after all
+sorts of extravagances, as to a kind of domestic peace. The
+inwardness and solidity of this quiet beauty comes from the
+intrinsic character of the pleasure which makes it up. It is no
+adventitious charm; but the eye in its continual passage over the
+object finds always the same response, the same adequacy; and the
+very process of perception is made delightful by the object's fitness
+to be perceived. The parts, thus coalescing, form a single object,
+the unity and simplicity of which are based upon the rhythm and
+correspondence of its elements.
+
+Symmetry is here what metaphysicians call a principle of
+individuation. By the emphasis which it lays upon the recurring
+elements, it cuts up the field into determinate units; all that lies
+between the beats is one interval, one individual. If there were no
+recurrent impressions, no corresponding points, the field of
+perception would remain a fluid continuum, without defined and
+recognizable divisions. The outlines of most things are
+symmetrical because we choose what symmetrical lines we find to
+be the boundaries of objects. Their symmetry is the condition of
+their unity, and their unity of their individuality and separate
+existence.
+
+Experience, to be sure, can teach us to regard unsymmetrical
+objects as wholes, because their elements move and change
+together in nature; but this is a principle of individuation, _a
+posteriori,_ founded on the association of recognized elements.
+These elements, to be recognized and seen to go together and form
+one thing, must first be somehow discriminated; and the symmetry,
+either of their parts, or of their position as wholes, may enable us
+to fix their boundaries and to observe their number. The category
+of unity, which we are so constantly imposing upon nature and its
+parts, has symmetry, then, for one of its instruments, for one of its
+bases of application.
+
+If symmetry, then, is a principle of individuation and helps us to
+distinguish objects, we cannot wonder that it helps us to enjoy the
+perception. For our intelligence loves to perceive; water is
+not more grateful to a parched throat than a principle of
+comprehension to a confused understanding. Symmetry clarifies,
+and we all know that light is sweet. At the same time, we can see
+why there are limits to the value of symmetry. In objects, for
+instance, that are too small or too diffused for composition,
+symmetry has no value. In an avenue symmetry is stately and
+impressive, but in a large park, or in the plan of a city, or the side
+wall of a gallery it produces monotony in the various views rather
+than unity in any one of them. Greek temples, never being very
+large, were symmetrical on all their facades; Gothic churches were
+generally designed to be symmetrical only in the west front, and in
+the transepts, while the side elevation as a whole was eccentric.
+This was probably an accident, due to the demands of the interior
+arrangement; but it was a fortunate one, as we may see by
+contrasting its effect with that of our stations, exhibition buildings,
+and other vast structures, where symmetry is generally introduced
+even in the most extensive facades which, being too much
+prolonged for their height, cannot be treated as units. The eye is
+not able to take them in at a glance, and does not get the effect of
+repose from the balance of the extremes, while the mechanical
+sameness of the sections, surveyed in succession, makes the
+impression of an unmeaning poverty of resource.
+
+Symmetry thus loses its value when it cannot, on account of the
+size of the object, contribute to the unity of our perception. The
+synthesis which it facilitates must be instantaneous. If the
+comprehension by which we unify our object is discursive, as, for
+instance, in conceiving the arrangement and numbering of the
+streets of New York, or the plan of the Escurial, the advantage of
+symmetry is an intellectual one; we can better imagine the relations
+of the parts, and draw a map of the whole in the fancy; but there is
+no advantage to direct perception, and therefore no added beauty.
+Symmetry is superfluous in those objects. Similarly animal and
+vegetable forms gain nothing by being symmetrically displayed, if
+the sense of their life and motion is to be given. When, however,
+these forms are used for mere decoration, not for the expression of
+their own vitality, then symmetry is again required to accentuate
+their unity and organization. This justifies the habit of
+conventionalizing natural forms, and the tendency of some kinds of
+hieratic art, like the Byzantine or Egyptian, to affect a rigid
+symmetry of posture. We can thereby increase the unity and force
+of the image without suggesting that individual life and mobility,
+which would interfere with the religious function of the object, as
+the symbol and embodiment of an impersonal faith.
+
+_Form the unity of a manifold._
+
+§ 23. Symmetry is evidently a kind of unity in variety, where a
+whole is determined by the rhythmic repetition of similars. We
+have seen that it has a value where it is an aid to unification. Unity
+would thus appear to be the virtue of forms; but a moment's
+reflection will show us that unity cannot be absolute and be a form;
+a form is an aggregation, it must have elements, and the manner in
+which the elements are combined constitutes the character of the
+form. A perfectly simple perception, in which there was no
+consciousness of the distinction and relation of parts, would not be
+a perception of form; it would be a sensation. Physiologically these
+sensations may be aggregates and their values, as in the case of
+musical tones, may differ according to the manner in which certain
+elements, beats, vibrations, nervous processes, or what not, are
+combined; but for consciousness the result is simple, and the value
+is the pleasantness of a datum and not of a process. Form, therefore,
+does not appeal to the unattentive; they get from objects only a
+vague sensation which may in them awaken extrinsic associations;
+they do not stop to survey the parts or to appreciate their relation,
+and consequently are insensible to the various charms of various
+unifications; they can find in objects only the value of material or
+of function, not that of form.
+
+Beauty of form, however, is what specifically appeals to an
+aesthetic nature; it is equally removed from the crudity of formless
+stimulation and from the emotional looseness of reverie and
+discursive thought. The indulgence in sentiment and suggestion, of
+which our time is fond, to the sacrifice of formal beauty, marks an
+absence of cultivation as real, if not as confessed, as that of the
+barbarian who revels in gorgeous confusion.
+
+The synthesis, then, which constitutes form is an activity of the
+mind; the unity arises consciously, and is an insight into the
+relation of sensible elements separately perceived. It differs from
+sensation in the consciousness of the synthesis, and from
+expression in the homogeneity of the elements, and in their
+common presence to sense.
+
+The variety of forms depends upon the character of the elements
+and on the variety of possible methods of unification. The elements
+may be all alike, and their only diversity be numerical. Their unity
+will then be merely the sense of their uniformity.[6] Or they may
+differ in kind, but so as to compel the mind to no particular order
+in their unification. Or they may finally be so constituted that they
+suggest inevitably the scheme of their unity; in this case there is
+organization in the object, and the synthesis of its parts is one and
+pre-determinate. We shall discuss these various forms in
+succession, pointing out the effects proper to each.
+
+_Multiplicity in uniformity._
+
+§ 24. The radical and typical case of the first kind of unity in
+variety is found in the perception of extension itself. This
+perception, if we look to its origin, may turn out to be primitive; no
+doubt the feeling of "crude extensity" is an original sensation;
+every inference, association, and distinction is a thing that looms
+up suddenly before the mind, and the nature and actuality of which
+is a datum of what -- to indicate its irresistible immediacy and
+indescribability -- we may well call sense. Forms are seen, and if
+we think of the origin of the perception, we may well call this
+vision a sensation. The distinction between a sensation of form,
+however, and one which is formless, regards the content and
+character, not the genesis of the perception. A distinction and
+association, or an inference, is a direct experience, a sensible fact;
+but it is the experience of a process, of a motion between two terms,
+and a consciousness of their coexistence and distinction; it is a
+feeling of relation. Now the sense of space is a feeling of this kind;
+the essence of it is the realization of a variety of directions and of
+possible motions, by which the relation of point to point is vaguely
+but inevitably given. The perception of extension is therefore a
+perception of form, although of the most rudimentary kind. It is
+merely _Auseinandersein,_ and we might call it the _materia
+prima_ of form, were it not capable of existing without further
+determination. For we can have the sense of space without the
+sense of boundaries; indeed, this intuition is what tempts us to
+declare space infinite. Space would have to consist of a finite
+number of juxtaposed blocks, if our experience of extension
+carried with it essentially the realization of limits.
+
+The aesthetic effect of extensiveness is also entirely different from
+that of particular shapes. Some things appeal to us by their surfaces,
+others by the lines that limit those surfaces. And this effect of
+surface is not necessarily an effect of material or colour; the
+evenness, monotony, and vastness of a great curtain of colour
+produce an effect which is that of the extreme of uniformity in the
+extreme of multiplicity; the eye wanders over a fluid infinity of
+unrecognizable positions, and the sense of their numberlessness
+and continuity is precisely the source of the emotion of extent. The
+emotion is primary and has undoubtedly a physiological ground,
+while the idea of size is secondary and involves associations and
+inferences. A small photograph of St. Peter's gives the idea of size;
+as does a distant view of the same object. But this is of course
+dependent on our realization of the distance, or of the scale of the
+representation. The value of size becomes immediate only when
+we are at close quarters with the object; then the surfaces really
+subtend a large angle in the field of vision, and the sense of
+vastness establishes its standard, which can afterwards be applied
+to other objects by analogy and contrast. There is also, to be sure, a
+moral and practical import in the known size of objects, which, by
+association, determines their dignity; but the pure sense of
+extension, based upon the attack of the object upon the
+apperceptive resources of the eye, is the truly aesthetic value which
+it concerns us to point out here, as the most rudimentary example
+of form.
+
+Although the effect of extension is not that of material, the two are
+best seen in conjunction. Material must appear in some form; but
+when its beauty is to be made prominent, it is well that this form
+should attract attention as little as possible to itself. Now, of all
+forms, absolute uniformity in extension is the simplest and most
+allied to the material; it gives the latter only just enough form to
+make it real and perceptible. Very rich and beautiful materials
+therefore do well to assume this form. You will spoil the beauty
+you have by superimposing another; as if you make a statue of
+gold, or flute a jasper column, or bedeck a velvet cloak. The beauty
+of stuffs appears when they are plain. Even stone gives its specific
+quality best in great unbroken spaces of wall; the simplicity of the
+form emphasizes the substance. And again, the effect of extensity
+is never long satisfactory unless it is superinduced upon some
+material beauty; the dignity of great hangings would suffer if they
+were not of damask, but of cotton, and the vast smoothness of the
+sky would grow oppressive if it were not of so tender a blue.
+
+_Example of the stars._
+
+§ 25. Another beauty of the sky -- the stars -- offers so striking and
+fascinating an illustration of the effect of multiplicity in uniformity,
+that I am tempted to analyze it at some length. To most people, I
+fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be
+at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about
+astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation
+of those orbs. The vague and illusive ideas thus aroused fall in so
+well with the dumb emotion we were already feeling, that we
+attribute this emotion to those ideas, and persuade ourselves that
+the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of
+astronomical facts.
+
+The idea of the insignificance of our earth and of the
+incomprehensible multiplicity of worlds is indeed immensely
+impressive; it may even be intensely disagreeable. There is
+something baffling about infinity; in its presence the sense of finite
+humility can never wholly banish the rebellious suspicion that we
+are being deluded. Our mathematical imagination is put on the rack
+by an attempted conception that has all the anguish of a nightmare
+and probably, could we but awake, all its laughable absurdity. But
+the obsession of this dream is an intellectual puzzle, not an
+aesthetic delight. It is not essential to our admiration. Before the
+days of Kepler the heavens declared the glory of God; and we
+needed no calculation of stellar distances, no fancies about a
+plurality of worlds, no image of infinite spaces, to make the stars
+sublime.
+
+Had we been taught to believe that the stars governed our fortunes,
+and were we reminded of fate whenever we looked at them, we
+should similarly tend to imagine that this belief was the source of
+their sublimity; and, if the superstition were dispelled, we should
+think the interest gone from the apparition. But experience would
+soon undeceive us, and prove to us that the sensuous character of
+the object was sublime in itself. Indeed, on account of that intrinsic
+sublimity the sky can be fitly chosen as a symbol for a sublime
+conception; the common quality in both makes each suggest the
+other. For that reason, too, the parable of the natal stars governing
+our lives is such a natural one to express our subjection to
+circumstances, and can be transformed by the stupidity of disciples
+into a literal tenet. In the same way, the kinship of the emotion
+produced by the stars with the emotion proper to certain religious
+moments makes the stars seem a religious object. They become,
+like impressive music, a stimulus to worship. But fortunately there
+are experiences which remain untouched by theory, and which
+maintain the mutual intelligence of men through the estrangements
+wrought by intellectual and religious systems. When the
+superstructures crumble, the common foundation of human
+sentience and imagination is exposed beneath.
+
+The intellectual suggestion of the infinity of nature can, moreover,
+be awakened by other experiences which are by no means sublime.
+A heap of sand will involve infinity as surely as a universe of suns
+and planets. Any object is infinitely divisible and, when we press
+the thought, can contain as many worlds with as many winged
+monsters and ideal republics as can the satellites of Sirius. But the
+infinitesimal does not move us aesthetically; it can only awaken an
+amused curiosity. The difference cannot lie in the import of the
+idea, which is objectively the same in both cases. It lies in the
+different immediate effect of the crude images which give us the
+type and meaning of each; the crude image that underlies the idea
+of the infinitesimal is the dot, the poorest and most uninteresting of
+impressions; while the crude image that underlies the idea of
+infinity is space, multiplicity in uniformity, and this, as we have
+seen, has a powerful effect on account of the breadth, volume, and
+omnipresence of the stimulation. Every point in the retina is evenly
+excited, and the local signs of all are simultaneously felt. This
+equable tension, this balance and elasticity in the very absence of
+fixity, give the vague but powerful feeling that we wish to describe.
+Did not the infinite, by this initial assault upon our senses, awe us
+and overwhelm us, as solemn music might, the idea of it would be
+abstract and moral like that of the infinitesimal, and nothing but an
+amusing curiosity.
+
+Nothing is objectively impressive; things are impressive only when
+they succeed in touching the sensibility of the observer, by finding
+the avenues to his brain and heart. The idea that the universe is a
+multitude of minute spheres circling, like specks of dust, in a dark
+and boundless void, might leave us cold and indifferent, if not
+bored and depressed, were it not that we identify this hypothetical
+scheme with the visible splendour, the poignant intensity, and the
+baffling number of the stars. So far is the object from giving value
+to the impression, that it is here, as it must always ultimately be,
+the impression that gives value to the object. For all worth leads us
+back to actual feeling somewhere, or else evaporates into nothing
+-- into a word and a superstition.
+
+Now, the starry heavens are very happily designed to intensify the
+sensations on which their beauties must rest. In the first place, the
+continuum of space is broken into points, numerous enough to give
+the utmost idea of multiplicity and yet so distinct and vivid that it
+is impossible not to remain aware of their individuality. The
+variety of local signs, without becoming organized into forms,
+remains prominent and irreducible. This makes the object infinitely
+more exciting than a plane surface would be. In the second place,
+the sensuous contrast of the dark background, -- blacker the clearer
+the night and the more stars we can see, -- with the palpitating fire
+of the stars themselves, could not be exceeded by any possible
+device. This material beauty adds incalculably, as we have already
+pointed out, to the inwardness and sublimity of the effect. To
+realize the great importance of these two elements, we need but to
+conceive their absence, and observe the change in the dignity of
+the result.
+
+Fancy a map of the heavens and every star plotted upon it, even
+those invisible to the naked eye: why would this object, as full of
+scientific suggestion surely as the reality, leave us so
+comparatively cold? Quite indifferent it might not leave us, for I
+have myself watched stellar photographs with almost inexhaustible
+wonder. The sense of multiplicity is naturally in no way
+diminished by the representation; but the poignancy of the
+sensation, the life of the light, are gone; and with the dulled
+impression the keenness of the emotion disappears. Or imagine the
+stars, undiminished in number, without losing any of their
+astronomical significance and divine immutability, marshalled in
+geometrical patterns; say in a Latin cross, with the words _In hoc
+signo vinces_ in a scroll around them. The beauty of the
+illumination would be perhaps increased, and its import, practical,
+religious, and cosmic, would surely be a little plainer; but where
+would be the sublimity of the spectacle? Irretrievably lost: and lost
+because the form of the object would no longer tantalize us with its
+sheer multiplicity, and with the consequent overpowering sense of
+suspense and awe.
+
+In a word, the infinity which moves us is the sense of multiplicity
+in uniformity. Accordingly things which have enough multiplicity,
+as the lights of a city seen across water, have an effect similar to
+that of the stars, if less intense; whereas a star, if alone, because the
+multiplicity is lacking, makes a wholly different impression. The
+single star is tender, beautiful, and mild; we can compare it to the
+humblest and sweetest of things:
+
+     A violet by a mossy stone
+     Half hidden from the eye,
+     Fair as _a star when only one
+     Is shining in the sky._
+
+It is, not only in fact but in nature, an attendant on the moon,
+associated with the moon, if we may be so prosaic here, not only
+by contiguity but also by similarity.
+
+     Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-regioned star
+     Or vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky.
+
+The same poet can say elsewhere of a passionate lover:
+
+          He arose
+     Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star,
+     Amid the sapphire heaven's deep repose.
+
+How opposite is all this from the cold glitter, the cruel and
+mysterious sublimity of the stars when they are many! With these
+we have no Sapphic associations; they make us think rather of
+Kant who could hit on nothing else to compare with his categorical
+imperative, perhaps because he found in both the same baffling
+incomprehensibility and the same fierce actuality. Such ultimate
+feelings are sensations of physical tension.
+
+_Defects of pure multiplicity._
+
+§ 26. This long analysis will be a sufficient illustration of the
+power of multiplicity in uniformity; we may now proceed to point
+out the limitations inherent in this form. The most obvious one is
+that of monotony; a file of soldiers or an iron railing is impressive
+in its way, but cannot long entertain us, nor hold us with that depth
+of developing interest, with which we might study a crowd or a
+forest of trees.
+
+The tendency of monotony is double, and in two directions
+deadens our pleasure. When the repeated impressions are acute,
+and cannot be forgotten in their endless repetition, their monotony
+becomes painful. The constant appeal to the same sense, the
+constant requirement of the same reaction, tires the system, and we
+long for change as for a relief. If the repeated stimulations are not
+very acute, we soon become unconscious of them; like the ticking
+of the clock, they become merely a factor in our bodily one, a
+cause, as the case may be, of a diffused pleasure or unrest; but they
+cease to present a distinguishable object.
+
+The pleasures, therefore, which a kindly but monotonous
+environment produces, often fail to make it beautiful, for the
+simple reason that the environment is not perceived. Likewise the
+hideousness of things to which we are accustomed -- the blemishes
+of the landscape, the ugliness of our clothes or of our walls -- do
+not oppress us, not so much because we do not see the ugliness as
+because we overlook the things. The beauties or defects of
+monotonous objects are easily lost, because the objects are
+themselves intermittent in consciousness. But it is of some
+practical importance to remark that this indifference of
+monotonous values is more apparent than real. The particular
+object ceases to be of consequence; but the congruity of its
+structure and quality with our faculties of perception remains, and
+its presence in our environment is still a constant source of vague
+irritation and friction, or of subtle and pervasive delight. And this
+value, although not associated with the image of the monotonous
+object, lies there in our mind, like all the vital and systemic
+feelings, ready to enhance the beauty of any object that arouses our
+attention, and meantime adding to the health and freedom of our
+life -- making whatever we do a little easier and pleasanter for us.
+A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken
+us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or the consciousness
+of a right life, can quicken us from within. To humanize our
+surroundings is, therefore, a task which should interest the
+physicians both of soul and body.
+
+But the monotony of multiplicity is not merely intrinsic in the form;
+what is perhaps even of greater consequence in the arts is the fact
+that its capacity for association is restricted. What is in itself
+uniform cannot have a great diversity of relations. Hence the
+dryness, the crisp definiteness and hardness, of those products of
+art which contain an endless repetition of the same elements. Their
+affinities are necessarily few; they are not fit for many uses, nor
+capable of expressing many ideas. The heroic couplet, now too
+much derided, is a form of this kind. Its compactness and
+inevitableness make it excellent for an epigram and adequate it for
+a satire, but its perpetual snap and unvarying rhythm are thin for an
+epic, and impossible for a song. The Greek colonnade, a form in
+many ways analogous, has similar limitations. Beautiful with a
+finished and restrained beauty, which our taste is hardly refined
+enough to appreciate, it is incapable of development. The
+experiments of Roman architecture sufficiently show it; the glory
+of which is their Roman frame rather than their Hellenic ornament.
+
+When the Greeks themselves had to face the problem of larger and
+more complex buildings, in the service of a supernatural and
+hierarchical system, they transformed their architecture into what
+we call Byzantine, and St. Sophia took the place of the Parthenon.
+Here a vast vault was introduced, the colonnade disappeared, the
+architrave was rounded into an arch from column to column, the
+capitals of these were changed from concave to convex, and a
+thousand other changes in structure and ornament introduced
+flexibility and variety. Architecture could in this way, precisely
+because more vague and barbarous, better adapt itself to the
+conditions of the new epoch. Perfect taste is itself a limitation, not
+because it intentionally excludes any excellence, but because it
+impedes the wandering of the arts into those bypaths of caprice and
+grotesqueness in which, although at the sacrifice of formal beauty,
+interesting partial effects might still be discovered. And this
+objection applies with double force to the first crystallizations of
+taste, when tradition has carried us but a little way in the right
+direction. The authorized effects are then very simple, and if we
+allow no others, our art becomes wholly inadequate to the
+functions ultimately imposed upon it. Primitive arts might furnish
+examples, but the state of English poetry at the time of Queen
+Anne is a sufficient illustration of this possibility. The French
+classicism, of which, the English school was an echo, was more
+vital and human, because it embodied a more native taste and a
+wider training.
+
+_Aesthetics of democracy._
+
+§ 27. It would be an error to suppose that aesthetic principles apply
+only to our judgments of works of art or of those natural objects
+which we attend to chiefly on account of their beauty. Every idea
+which is formed in the human mind, every activity and emotion,
+has some relation, direct or indirect, to pain and pleasure. If, as is
+the case in all the more important instances, these fluid activities
+and emotions precipitate, as it were, in their evanescence certain
+psychical solids called ideas of things, then the concomitant
+pleasures are incorporated more or less in those concrete ideas and
+the things acquire an aesthetic colouring. And although this
+aesthetic colouring may be the last quality we notice in objects of
+practical interest, its influence upon us is none the less real, and
+often accounts for a great deal in our moral and practical attitude.
+
+In the leading political and moral idea of our time, in the idea of
+democracy, I think there is a strong aesthetic ingredient, and the
+power of the idea of democracy over the imagination is an
+illustration of that effect of multiplicity in uniformity which we
+have been studying. Of course, nothing could be more absurd than
+to suggest that the French Revolution, with its immense
+implications, had an aesthetic preference for its basis; it sprang, as
+we know, from the hatred of oppression, the rivalry of classes, and
+the aspiration after a freer social and strictly moral organization.
+But when these moral forces were suggesting and partly realizing
+the democratic idea, this idea was necessarily vividly present to
+men's thoughts; the picture of human life which it presented was
+becoming familiar, and was being made the sanction and goal of
+constant endeavour. Nothing so much enhances a good as to make
+sacrifices for it. The consequence was that democracy, prized at
+first as a means to happiness and as an instrument of good
+government, was acquiring an intrinsic value; it was beginning to
+seem good in itself, in fact, the only intrinsically right and perfect
+arrangement. A utilitarian scheme was receiving an aesthetic
+consecration. That which was happening to democracy had
+happened before to the feudal and royalist systems; they too had
+come to be prized in themselves, for the pleasure men took in
+thinking of society organized in such an ancient, and thereby to
+their fancy, appropriate and beautiful manner. The practical value
+of the arrangement, on which, of course, it is entirely dependent for
+its origin and authority, was forgotten, and men were ready to
+sacrifice their welfare to their sense of propriety; that is, they
+allowed an aesthetic good to outweigh a practical one. That seems
+now a superstition, although, indeed, a very natural and even noble
+one. Equally natural and noble, but no less superstitious, is our
+own belief in the divine right of democracy. Its essential right is
+something purely aesthetic.
+
+Such aesthetic love of uniformity, however, is usually disguised
+under some moral label: we call it the lore of justice, perhaps
+because we have not considered that the value of justice also, in so
+far as it is not derivative and utilitarian, must be intrinsic, or, what
+is practically the same thing, aesthetic. But occasionally the
+beauties of democracy are presented to us undisguised. The
+writings of Walt Whitman are a notable example. Never, perhaps,
+has the charm of uniformity in multiplicity been felt so completely
+and so exclusively. Everywhere it greets us with a passionate
+preference; not flowers but leaves of grass, not music but
+drum-taps, not composition but aggregation, not the hero but the average
+man, not the crisis but the vulgarest moment; and by this resolute
+marshalling of nullities, by this effort to show us everything as a
+momentary pulsation of a liquid and structureless whole, he
+profoundly stirs the imagination. We may wish to dislike this
+power, but, I think, we must inwardly admire it. For whatever
+practical dangers we may see in this terrible levelling, our aesthetic
+faculty can condemn no actual effect; its privilege is to be pleased
+by opposites, and to be capable of finding chaos sublime without
+ceasing to make nature beautiful.
+
+_Values of types and values of examples._
+
+§ 28. It is time we should return to the consideration of abstract
+forms. Nearest in nature to the example of uniformity in
+multiplicity, we found those objects, like a reversible pattern, that
+having some variety of parts invite us to survey them in different
+orders, and so bring into play in a marked manner the faculty of
+apperception.
+
+There is in the senses, as we have seen, a certain form of
+stimulation, a certain measure and rhythm of waves with which the
+aesthetic value of the sensation is connected. So when, in the
+perception of the object, a notable contribution is made by memory
+and mental habit, the value of the perception will be due, not only
+to the pleasantness of the external stimulus, but also to the
+pleasantness of the apperceptive reaction; and the latter source of
+value will be more important in proportion as the object perceived
+is more dependent, for the form and meaning it presents, upon our
+past experience and imaginative trend, and less on the structure of
+the external object.
+
+Our apperception of form varies not only with our constitution, age,
+and health, as does the appreciation of sensuous values, but also
+with our education and genius. The more indeterminate the object,
+the greater share must subjective forces have in determining our
+perception; for, of course, every perception is in itself perfectly
+specific, and can be called indefinite only in reference to an
+abstract ideal which it is expected to approach. Every cloud has
+just the outline it has, although we may call it vague, because we
+cannot classify its form under any geometrical or animal species; it
+would be first definitely a whale, and then would become
+indefinite until we saw our way to calling it a camel. But while in
+the intermediate stage, the cloud would be a form in the perception
+of which there would be little apperceptive activity little reaction
+from the store of our experience, little sense of form; its value
+would be in its colour and transparency, and in the suggestion of
+lightness and of complex but gentle movement.
+
+But the moment we said "Yes, very like a whale," a new kind of
+value would appear; the cloud could now be beautiful or ugly, not
+as a cloud merely, but as a whale. We do not speak now of the
+associations of the idea, as with the sea, or fishermen's yarns; that
+is an extrinsic matter of expression. We speak simply of the
+intrinsic value of the form of the whale, of its lines, its movement,
+its proportion. This is a more or less individual set of images which
+are revived in the act of recognition; this revival constitutes the
+recognition, and the beauty of the form is the pleasure of that
+revival. A certain musical phrase, as it were, is played in the brain;
+the awakening of that echo is the act of apperception and the
+harmony of the present stimulation with the form of that phrase;
+the power of this particular object to develope and intensify that
+generic phrase in the direction of pleasure, is the test of the formal
+beauty of this example. For these cerebral phrases have a certain
+rhythm; this rhythm can, by the influence of the stimulus that now
+reawakens it, be marred or enriched, be made more or less marked
+and delicate; and as this conflict or reinforcement comes, the
+object is ugly or beautiful in form.
+
+Such an aesthetic value is thus dependent on two things. The first
+is the acquired character of the apperceptive form evoked; it may
+be a cadenza or a trill, a major or a minor chord, a rose or a violet,
+a goddess or a dairy-maid; and as one or another of these is
+recognized, an aesthetic dignity and tone is given to the object. But
+it will be noticed that in such mere recognition very little pleasure
+is found, or, what is the same thing, different aesthetic types in the
+abstract have little difference in intrinsic beauty. The great
+difference lies in their affinities. What will decide us to like or not
+to like the type of our apperception will be not so much what this
+type is, as its fitness to the context of our mind. It is like a word in
+a poem, more effective by its fitness than by its intrinsic beauty,
+although that is requisite too. We can be shocked at an incongruity
+of natures more than we can be pleased by the intrinsic beauty of
+each nature apart, so long, that is, as they remain abstract natures,
+objects recognized without being studied. The aesthetic dignity of
+the form, then, tells us the kind of beauty we are to expect, affects
+us by its welcome or unwelcome promise, but hardly gives us a
+positive pleasure in the beauty itself.
+
+Now this is the first thing in the value of a form, the value of the
+type as such; the second and more important element is the relation
+of the particular impression to the form under which it is
+apperceived. This determines the value of the object as an example
+of its class. After our mind is pitched to the key and rhythm of a
+certain idea, say of a queen, it remains for the impression to fulfil,
+aggrandize, or enrich this form by a sympathetic embodiment of it.
+Then we have a queen that is truly royal. But if instead there is
+disappointment, if this particular queen is an ugly one, although
+perhaps she might have pleased as a witch, this is because the
+apperceptive form and the impression give a cerebral discord. The
+object is unideal, that is, the novel, external element is
+inharmonious with the revived and internal element by suggesting
+which the object has been apperceived.
+
+_Origin of types._
+
+§ 29. A most important thing, therefore, in the perception of form
+is the formation of types in our mind, with reference to which
+examples are to be judged. I say the formation of them, for we can
+hardly consider the theory that they are eternal as a possible one in
+psychology. The Platonic doctrine on that point is a striking
+illustration of an equivocation we mentioned in the beginning;[7]
+namely, that the import of an experience is regarded as a
+manifestation of its cause -- the product of a faculty substituted for
+the description of its function. Eternal types are the instrument of
+aesthetic life, not its foundation. Take the aesthetic attitude, and
+you have for the moment an eternal idea; an idea, I mean, that you
+treat as an absolute standard, just as when you take the perceptive
+attitude you have an external object which you treat as an absolute
+existence. But the aesthetic, like the perceptive faculty, can be
+made an object of study in turn, and its theory can be sought; and
+then the eternal idea, like the external object, is seen to be a
+product of human nature, a symbol of experience, and an
+instrument of thought.
+
+The question whether there are not, in external nature or in the
+mind of God, objects and eternal types, is indeed not settled, it is
+not even touched by this inquiry; but it is indirectly shown to be
+futile, because such transcendent realities, if they exist, can have
+nothing to do with our ideas of them. The Platonic idea of a tree
+may exist; how should I deny it? How should I deny that I might
+some day find myself outside the sky gazing at it, and feeling that I,
+with my mental vision, am beholding the plenitude of arboreal
+beauty, perceived in this world only as a vague essence haunting
+the multiplicity of finite trees? But what can that have to do with
+my actual sense of what a tree should be? Shall we take the
+Platonic myth literally, and say the idea is a memory of the tree I
+have already seen in heaven? How else establish any relation
+between that eternal object and the type in my mind? But why, in
+that case, this infinite variability of ideal trees? Was the Tree
+Beautiful an oak, or a cedar, an English or an American elm? My
+actual types are finite and mutually exclusive; that heavenly type
+must be one and infinite. The problem is hopeless.
+
+Very simple, on the other hand, is the explanation of the existence
+of that type as a residuum of experience. Our idea of an individual
+thing is a compound and residuum of our several experiences of it;
+and in the same manner our idea of a class is a compound and
+residuum of our ideas of the particulars that compose it. Particular
+impressions have, by virtue of their intrinsic similarity or of the
+identity of their relations, a tendency to be merged and identified,
+so that many individual perceptions leave but a single blurred
+memory that stands for them all, because it combines their several
+associations. Similarly, when various objects have many common
+characteristics, the mind is incapable of keeping them apart. It
+cannot hold clearly so great a multitude of distinctions and
+relations as would be involved in naming and conceiving
+separately each grain of sand, or drop of water, each fly or horse or
+man that we have ever seen. The mass of our experience has
+therefore to be classified, if it is to be available at all. Instead of a
+distinct image to represent each of our original impressions, we
+have a general resultant -- a composite photograph -- of those
+impressions.
+
+This resultant image is the idea of the class. It often has very few,
+if any, of the sensible properties of the particulars that underlie it,
+often an artificial symbol -- the sound of a word -- is the only
+element, present to all the instances, which the generic image
+clearly contains. For, of course, the reason why a name can
+represent a class of objects is that the name is the most
+conspicuous element of identity in the various experiences of
+objects in that class. We have seen many horses, but if we are not
+lovers of the animal, nor particularly keen observers, very likely
+we retain no clear image of all that mass of impressions except the
+reverberation of the sound "horse," which really or mentally has
+accompanied all those impressions. This sound, therefore, is the
+content of our general idea, and to it cling all the associations
+which constitute our sense of what the word means. But a person
+with a memory predominantly visual would probably add to this
+remembered sound a more or less detailed image of the animal;
+some particular horse in some particular attitude might possibly be
+recalled, but more probably some imaginative construction,
+some dream image, would accompany the sound. An image which
+reproduced no particular horse exactly, but which was a
+spontaneous fiction of the fancy, would serve, by virtue of its felt
+relations, the same purpose as the sound itself. Such a spontaneous
+image would be, of course, variable. In fact, no image can, strictly
+speaking, ever recur. But these percepts, as they are called,
+springing up in the mind like flowers from the buried seeds of past
+experience, would inherit all the powers of suggestion which are
+required by any instrument of classification.
+
+These powers of suggestion have probably a cerebral basis. The
+new percept -- the generic idea -- repeats to a great extent, both in
+nature and localization, the excitement constituting the various
+original impressions; as the percept reproduces more or less of
+these it will be a more or less full and impartial representative of
+them. Not all the suggestions of a word or image are equally ripe.
+A generic idea or type usually presents to us a very inadequate and
+biassed view of the field it means to cover. As we reflect and seek
+to correct this inadequacy, the percept changes on our hands. The
+very consciousness that other individuals and other qualities fall
+under our concept, changes this concept, as a psychological
+presence, and alters its distinctness and extent. When I remember,
+to use a classical example, that the triangle is not isosceles, nor
+scalene, nor rectangular, but each and all of those, I reduce my
+percept to the word and its definition, with perhaps a sense of the
+general motion of the hand and eye by which we trace a three-cornered
+figure.
+
+Since the production of a general idea is thus a matter of subjective
+bias, we cannot expect that a type should be the exact average of
+the examples from which it is drawn. In a rough way, it is the
+average; a fact that in itself is the strongest of arguments against
+the independence or priority of the general idea. The beautiful
+horse, the beautiful speech, the beautiful face, is always a medium
+between the extremes which our experience has offered. It is
+enough that a given characteristic should be generally present in
+our experience, for it to become an indispensable element of the
+ideal. There is nothing in itself beautiful or necessary in the shape
+of the human ear, or in the presence of nails on the fingers and toes;
+but the ideal of man, which the preposterous conceit of our
+judgment makes us set up as divine and eternal, requires these
+precise details; without them the human form would be repulsively
+ugly.
+
+It often happens that the accidents of experience make us in this
+way introduce into the ideal, elements which, if they could be
+excluded without disgusting us, would make possible satisfactions
+greater than those we can now enjoy. Thus the taste formed by one
+school of art may condemn the greater beauties created by another.
+In morals we have the same phenomenon. A barbarous ideal of life
+requires tasks and dangers incompatible with happiness; a rude and
+oppressed conscience is incapable of regarding as good a state
+which excludes its own acrid satisfactions. So, too, a fanatical
+imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as
+infinitely cruel. The purpose of education is, of course, to free us
+from these prejudices, and to develope our ideals in the direction of
+the greatest possible good. Evidently the ideal has been formed by
+the habit of perception; it is, in a rough way, that average form
+which we expect and most readily apperceive. The propriety and
+necessity of it is entirely relative to our experience and faculty of
+apperception. The shock of surprise, the incongruity with the
+formed percept, is the essence and measure of ugliness.
+
+_The average modified in the direction of pleasure._
+
+§ 30. Nevertheless we do not form aesthetic ideals any more than
+other general types, entirely without bias. We have already
+observed that a percept seldom gives an impartial compound of the
+objects of which it is the generic image. This partiality is due to a
+variety of circumstances. One is the unequal accuracy of our
+observation. If some interest directs our attention to a particular
+quality of objects, that quality will be prominent in our percept; it
+may even be the only content clearly given in our general idea; and
+any object, however similar in other respects to those of the given
+class, will at once be distinguished as belonging to a different
+species if it lacks that characteristic on which our attention is
+particularly fixed. Our percepts are thus habitually biassed in the
+direction of practical interest, if practical interest does not indeed
+entirely govern their formation. In the same manner, our aesthetic
+ideals are biassed in the direction of aesthetic interest. Not all parts
+of an object are equally congruous with our perceptive faculty; not
+all elements are noted with the same pleasure. Those, therefore,
+which are agreeable are chiefly dwelt upon by the lover of beauty,
+and his percept will give an average of things with a great
+emphasis laid on that part of them which is beautiful. The ideal
+will thus deviate from the average in the direction of the observer's
+pleasure.
+
+For this reason the world is so much more beautiful to a poet or an
+artist than to an ordinary man. Each object, as his aesthetic sense is
+developed, is perhaps less beautiful than to the uncritical eye; his
+taste becomes difficult, and only the very best gives him unalloyed
+satisfaction. But while each work of nature and art is thus
+apparently blighted by his greater demands and keener susceptibility,
+the world itself, and the various natures it contains, are
+to him unspeakably beautiful. The more blemishes he can see
+in men, the more excellence he sees in man, and the more bitterly
+he laments the fate of each particular soul, the more reverence and
+love he has for the soul in its ideal essence. Criticism and
+idealization involve each other. The habit of looking for beauty in
+everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things; our sense,
+hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.
+But this demand for perfection becomes at the same time the
+nucleus of our observation; from every side a quick affinity draws
+what is beautiful together and stores it in the mind, giving body
+there to the blind yearnings of our nature. Many imperfect things
+crystallize into a single perfection. The mind is thus peopled by
+general ideas in which beauty is the chief quality; and these ideas
+are at the same time the types of things. The type is still a natural
+resultant of particular impressions; but the formation of it has been
+guided by a deep subjective bias in favour of what has delighted
+the eye.
+
+This theory can be easily tested by asking whether, in the case
+where the ideal differs from the average form of objects, this
+variation is not due to the intrinsic pleasantness or impressiveness
+of the quality exaggerated. For instance, in the human form, the
+ideal differs immensely from the average. In many respects the
+extreme or something near it is the most beautiful. Xenophon
+describes the women of Armenia as kalai kai megalai, and we
+should still speak of one as fair and tall and of another as fair but
+little. Size is therefore, even where least requisite, a thing in which
+the ideal exceeds the average. And the reason -- apart from
+associations of strength -- is that unusual size makes things
+conspicuous. The first prerequisite of effect is impression, and size
+helps that; therefore in the aesthetic ideal the average will be
+modified by being enlarged, because that is a change in the
+direction of our pleasure, and size will be an element of beauty.[8]
+
+Similarly the eyes, in themselves beautiful, will be enlarged also;
+and generally whatever makes by its sensuous quality, by its
+abstract form, or by its expression, a particular appeal to our
+attention and contribution to our delight, will count for more in the
+ideal type than its frequency would warrant. The generic image has
+been constructed under the influence of a selective attention, bent
+upon aesthetic worth.
+
+To praise any object for approaching the ideal of its kind is
+therefore only a roundabout way of specifying its intrinsic merit
+and expressing its direct effect on our sensibility. If in referring to
+the ideal we were not thus analyzing the real, the ideal would be an
+irrelevant and unmeaning thing. We know what the ideal is
+because we observe what pleases us in the reality. If we allow the
+general notion to tyrannize at all over the particular impression and
+to blind us to new and unclassified beauties which the latter may
+contain, we are simply substituting words for feelings, and making
+a verbal classification pass for an aesthetic judgment. Then the
+sense of beauty is gone to seed. Ideals have their uses, but their
+authority is wholly representative. They stand for specific
+satisfactions, or else they stand for nothing at all.
+
+In fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas
+and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods,
+are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for
+experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and
+surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder
+hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and
+direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to
+bear our ignorance of fact.
+
+The same thing happens, in a way, in other fields. Our armies
+are devices necessitated by our weakness; our property an
+encumbrance required by our need. If our situation were not
+precarious, these great engines of death and life would not be
+invented. And our intelligence is such another weapon against fate.
+We need not lament the fact, since, after all, to build these various
+structures is, up to a certain point, the natural function of human
+nature. The trouble is not that the products are always subjective,
+but that they are sometimes unfit and torment the spirit which they
+exercise. The pathetic part of our situation appears only when we
+so attach ourselves to those necessary but imperfect fictions, as to
+reject the facts from which they spring and of which they seek to
+be prophetic. We are then guilty of that substitution of means for
+ends, which is called idolatry in religion, absurdity in logic, and
+folly in morals. In aesthetics the thing has no name, but is
+nevertheless very common; for it is found whenever we speak of
+what ought to please, rather than of what actually pleases.
+
+_Are all things beautiful?_
+
+§ 31. These principles lead to an intelligible answer to a question
+which is not uninteresting in itself and crucial in a system of
+aesthetics. Are all things beautiful? Are all types equally beautiful
+when we abstract from our practical prejudices? If the reader has
+given his assent to the foregoing propositions, he will easily see
+that, in one sense, we must declare that no object is essentially ugly.
+If impressions are painful, they are objectified with difficulty; the
+perception of a thing is therefore, under normal circumstances,
+when the senses are not fatigued, rather agreeable than
+disagreeable. And when the frequent perception of a class of
+objects has given rise to an apperceptive norm, and we have an
+ideal of the species, the recognition and exemplification of that
+norm will give pleasure, in proportion to the degree of interest
+and accuracy with which we have made our observations. The
+naturalist accordingly sees beauties to which the academic artist is
+blind, and each new environment must open to us, if we allow it to
+educate our perception, a new wealth of beautiful forms.
+
+But we are not for this reason obliged to assert that all gradations
+of beauty and dignity are a matter of personal and accidental bias.
+The mystics who declare that to God there is no distinction in the
+value of things, and that only our human prejudice makes us prefer
+a rose to an oyster, or a lion to a monkey, have, of course, a reason
+for what they say. If we could strip ourselves of our human nature,
+we should undoubtedly find ourselves incapable of making these
+distinctions, as well as of thinking, perceiving, or willing in any
+way which is now possible to us. But how things would appear to
+us if we were not human is, to a man, a question of no importance.
+Even, the mystic to whom the definite constitution of his own mind
+is so hateful, can only paralyze without transcending his faculties.
+A passionate negation, the motive of which, although morbid, is in
+spite of itself perfectly human, absorbs all his energies, and his
+ultimate triumph is to attain the absoluteness of indifference.
+
+What is true of mysticism in general, is true also of its
+manifestation in aesthetics. If we could so transform our taste as to
+find beauty everywhere, because, perhaps, the ultimate nature of
+things is as truly exemplified in one thing as in another, we should,
+in fact, have abolished taste altogether. For the ascending series of
+aesthetic satisfactions we should have substituted a monotonous
+judgment of identity. If things are beautiful not by virtue of their
+differences but by virtue of an identical something which they
+equally contain, then there could be no discrimination in beauty.
+Like substance, beauty would be everywhere one and the same,
+and any tendency to prefer one thing to another would be a proof
+of finitude and illusion. When we try to make our judgments
+absolute, what we do is to surrender our natural standards and
+categories, and slip into another genus, until we lose ourselves in
+the satisfying vagueness of mere being.
+
+Relativity to our partial nature is therefore essential to all our
+definite thoughts, judgments, and feelings. And when once the
+human bias is admitted as a legitimate, because for us a necessary,
+basis of preference, the whole wealth of nature is at once organized
+by that standard into a hierarchy of values. Everything is beautiful
+because everything is capable in some degree of interesting and
+charming our attention; but things differ immensely in this
+capacity to please us in the contemplation of them, and therefore
+they differ immensely in beauty. Could our nature be fixed and
+determined once for all in every particular, the scale of aesthetic
+values would become certain. We should not dispute about tastes,
+no longer because a common principle of preference could not be
+discovered, but rather because any disagreement would then be
+impossible.
+
+As a matter of fact, however, human nature is a vague abstraction;
+that which is common to all men is the least part of their natural
+endowment. Aesthetic capacity is accordingly very unevenly
+distributed; and the world of beauty is much vaster and more
+complex to one man than to another. So long, indeed, as the
+distinction is merely one of development, so that we recognize in
+the greatest connoisseur only the refinement of the judgments of
+the rudest peasant, our aesthetic principle has not changed; we
+might say that, in so far, we had a common standard more or less
+widely applied. We might say so, because that standard would be
+an implication of a common nature more or less fully developed.
+
+But men do not differ only in the degree of their susceptibility,
+they differ also in its direction. Human nature branches into
+opposed and incompatible characters. And taste follows this
+bifurcation. We cannot, except whimsically, say that a taste for
+music is higher or lower than a taste for sculpture. A man might be
+a musician and a sculptor by turns; that would only involve a
+perfectly conceivable enlargement in human genius. But the union
+thus effected would be an accumulation of gifts in the observer, not
+a combination of beauties in the object. The excellence of
+sculpture and that of music would remain entirely independent and
+heterogeneous. Such divergences are like those of the outer senses
+to which these arts appeal. Sound and colour have analogies only
+in their lowest depth, as vibrations and excitement; as they grow
+specific and objective, they diverge; and although the same
+consciousness perceives them, it perceives them as unrelated and
+uncombinable objects.
+
+The ideal enlargement of human capacity, therefore, has no
+tendency to constitute a single standard of beauty. These standards
+remain the expression of diverse habits of sense and imagination.
+The man who combines the greatest range with the greatest
+endowment in each particular, will, of course, be the critic most
+generally respected. He will express the feelings of the greater
+number of men. The advantage of scope in criticism lies not in the
+improvement of our sense in each particular field; here the artist
+will detect the amateur's shortcomings. But no man is a specialist
+with his whole soul. Some latent capacity he has for other
+perceptions; and it is for the awakening of these, and their
+marshalling before him, that the student of each kind of beauty
+turns to the lover of them all.
+
+The temptation, therefore, to say that all things are really equally
+beautiful arises from an imperfect analysis, by which the
+operations of the aesthetic consciousness are only partially
+disintegrated. The dependence of the _degrees_ of beauty upon
+our nature is perceived, while the dependence of its _essence_
+upon our nature is still ignored. All things are not equally beautiful
+because the subjective bias that discriminates between them is the
+cause of their being beautiful at all. The principle of personal
+preference is the same as that of human taste; real and objective
+beauty, in contrast to a vagary of individuals, means only an
+affinity to a more prevalent and lasting susceptibility, a
+response toa more general and fundamental demand. And the keener
+discrimination, by which the distance between beautiful and ugly
+things is increased, far from being a loss of aesthetic insight, is a
+development of that faculty by the exercise of which beauty comes
+into the world.
+
+_Effects of indeterminate organization._
+
+§ 32. It is the free exercise of the activity of apperception that gives
+so peculiar an interest to indeterminate objects, to the vague, the
+incoherent, the suggestive, the variously interpretable. The more
+this effect is appealed to, the greater wealth of thought is presumed
+in the observer, and the less mastery is displayed by the artist. A
+poor and literal mind cannot enjoy the opportunity for reverie and
+construction given by the stimulus of indeterminate objects; it
+lacks the requisite resources. It is nonplussed and annoyed, and
+turns away to simpler and more transparent things with a feeling of
+helplessness often turning into contempt. And, on the other hand,
+the artist who is not artist enough, who has too many irrepressible
+talents and too little technical skill, is sure to float in the region of
+the indeterminate. He sketches and never paints; he hints and never
+expresses; he stimulates and never informs. This is the method of
+the individuals and of the nations that have more genius than art.
+
+The consciousness that accompanies this characteristic is the sense
+of profundity, of mighty significance. And this feeling is not
+necessarily an illusion. The nature of our materials -- be they
+words, colours, or plastic matter -- imposes a limit and bias upon
+our expression. The reality of experience can never be quite
+rendered through these media. The greatest mastery of technique
+will therefore come short of perfect adequacy and exhaustiveness;
+there must always remain a penumbra and fringe of suggestion if
+the most explicit representation is to communicate a truth. When
+there is real profundity, -- when the living core of things is most
+firmly grasped, -- there will accordingly be a felt inadequacy of
+expression, and an appeal to the observer to piece out our
+imperfections with his thoughts. But this should come only after
+the resources of a patient and well-learned art have been exhausted;
+else what is felt as depth is really confusion and incompetence. The
+simplest thing becomes unutterable, if we have forgotten how to
+speak. And a habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign
+of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has
+not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and
+the impression that has not learned to express itself -- all of which
+are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible
+soul.
+
+Our age is given to this sort of self-indulgence, and on both the
+grounds mentioned. Our public, without being really trained, -- for
+we appeal to too large a public to require training in it, -- is well
+informed and eagerly responsive to everything; it is ready to work
+pretty hard, and do its share towards its own profit and
+entertainment. It becomes a point of pride with it to understand and
+appreciate everything. And our art, in its turn, does not overlook
+this opportunity. It becomes disorganized, sporadic, whimsical,
+and experimental. The crudity we are too distracted to refine, we
+accept as originality, and the vagueness we are too pretentious to
+make accurate, we pass off as sublimity. This is the secret of
+making great works on novel principles, and of writing hard books
+easily.
+
+_Example of landscape._
+
+§ 33. An extraordinary taste for landscape compensates us for this
+ignorance of what is best and most finished in the arts. The natural
+landscape is an indeterminate object; it almost always contains
+enough diversity to allow the eye a great liberty in selecting,
+emphasizing, and grouping its elements, and it is furthermore rich
+in suggestion and in vague emotional stimulus. A landscape to be
+seen has to be composed, and to be loved has to be moralized. That
+is the reason why rude or vulgar people are indifferent to their
+natural surroundings. It does not occur to them that the work-a-day
+world is capable of aesthetic contemplation. Only on holidays,
+when they add to themselves and their belongings some unusual
+ornament, do they stop to watch the effect. The far more beautiful
+daily aspects of their environment escape them altogether. When,
+however, we learn to apperceive; when we grow fond of tracing
+lines and developing vistas; when, above all, the subtler influences
+of places on our mental tone are transmuted into an expressiveness
+in those places, and they are furthermore poetized by our
+day-dreams, and turned by our instant fancy into so many hints of a
+fairyland of happy living and vague adventure, -- then we feel that
+the landscape is beautiful. The forest, the fields, all wild or rural
+scenes, are then full of companionship and entertainment.
+
+This is a beauty dependent on reverie, fancy, and objectified
+emotion. The promiscuous natural landscape cannot be enjoyed in
+any other way. It has no real unity, and therefore requires to have
+some form or other supplied by the fancy; which can be the more
+readily done, in that the possible forms are many, and the constant
+changes in the object offer varying suggestions to the eye. In fact,
+psychologically speaking, there is no such thing as a landscape;
+what we call such is an infinity of different scraps and glimpses
+given in succession. Even a painted landscape, although it tends to
+select and emphasize some parts of the field, is composed by
+adding together a multitude of views. When this painting is
+observed in its turn, it is surveyed as a real landscape would be,
+and apperceived partially and piecemeal; although, of course, it
+offers much less wealth of material than its living original, and is
+therefore vastly inferior.
+
+Only the extreme of what is called impressionism tries to give
+upon canvas one absolute momentary view; the result is that when
+the beholder has himself actually been struck by that aspect, the
+picture has an extraordinary force and emotional value -- like the
+vivid power of recalling the past possessed by smells. But, on the
+other hand, such a work is empty and trivial in the extreme; it is
+the photograph of a detached impression, not followed, as it would
+be in nature, by many variations of itself. An object so unusual is
+often unrecognizable, if the vision thus unnaturally isolated has
+never happened to come vividly into our own experience. The
+opposite school -- what might be called _discursive_ landscape
+painting -- collects so many glimpses and gives so fully the sum of
+our positive observations of a particular scene, that its work is sure
+to be perfectly intelligible and plain. If it seems unreal and
+uninteresting, that is because it is formless, like the collective
+object it represents, while it lacks that sensuous intensity and
+movement which might have made the reality stimulating.
+
+The landscape contains, of course, innumerable things which have
+determinate forms; but if the attention is directed specifically to
+them, we have no longer what, by a curious limitation of the word,
+is called the love of nature. Not very long ago it was usual for
+painters of landscapes to introduce figures, buildings, or ruins to
+add some human association to the beauty of the place. Or, if
+wildness and desolation were to be pictured, at least one weary
+wayfarer must be seen sitting upon a broken column. He might
+wear a toga and then be Marius among the ruins of Carthage. The
+landscape without figures would have seemed meaningless; the
+spectator would have sat in suspense awaiting something, as at
+the theatre when the curtain rises on an empty stage. The
+indeterminateness of the suggestions of an unhumanized scene was
+then felt as a defect; now we feel it rather as an exaltation. We
+need to be free; our emotion suffices us; we do not ask for a
+description of the object which interests us as a part of ourselves.
+We should blush to say so simple and obvious a thing as that to us
+"the mountains are a feeling"; nor should we think of apologizing
+for our romanticism as Byron did:
+
+     I love not man the less but nature more
+     From these our interviews, in which I steal,
+     From all I may be, or have been before,
+     To mingle with the universe, and feel
+     What I can ne'er express.
+
+This ability to rest in nature unadorned and to find entertainment in
+her aspects, is, of course, a great gain. Aesthetic education consists
+in training ourselves to see the maximum of beauty. To see it in the
+physical world, which must continually be about us, is a great
+progress toward that marriage of the imagination with the reality
+which is the goal of contemplation.
+
+While we gain this mastery of the formless, however, we should
+not lose the more necessary capacity of seeing form in those things
+which happen to have it. In respect to most of those things which
+are determinate as well as natural, we are usually in that state of
+aesthetic unconsciousness which the peasant is in in respect to the
+landscape. We treat human life and its environment with the same
+utilitarian eye with which he regards the field and mountain. That
+is beautiful which is expressive of convenience and wealth; the rest
+is indifferent. If we mean by love of nature aesthetic delight in the
+world in which we casually live (and what can be more _natural_
+than man and all his arts?), we may say that the absolute love of
+_nature_ hardly exists among us. What we love is the stimulation
+of our own personal emotions and dreams; and landscape appeals
+to us, as music does to those who have no sense for musical form.
+
+There would seem to be no truth in the saying that the ancients
+loved nature less than we. They loved landscape less -- less, at
+least, in proportion to their love of the definite things it contained.
+The vague and changing effects of the atmosphere, the masses of
+mountains, the infinite and living complexity of forests, did not
+fascinate them. They had not that preponderant taste for the
+indeterminate that makes the landscape a favourite subject of
+contemplation. But love of nature, and comprehension of her, they
+had in a most eminent degree; in fact, they actually made explicit
+that objectification of our own soul in her, which for the romantic
+poet remains a mere vague and shifting suggestion. What are the
+celestial gods, the nymphs, the fauns, the dryads, but the definite
+apperceptions of that haunting spirit which we think we see in the
+sky, the mountains, and the woods? We may think that our vague
+intuition grasps the truth of what their childish imagination turned
+into a fable. But our belief, if it is one, is just as fabulous, just as
+much a projection of human nature into material things; and if we
+renounce all positive conception of quasi-mental principles in
+nature, and reduce our moralizing of her to a poetic expression of
+our own sensations, then can we say that our verbal and illusive
+images are comparable as representations of the life of nature to
+the precision, variety, humour, and beauty of the Greek mythology?
+
+_Extensions to objects usually not regarded authentically._
+
+§ 34. It may not be superfluous to mention here certain analogous
+fields where the human mind gives a series of unstable forms to
+objects in themselves indeterminate.[9] History, philosophy,
+natural as well as moral, and religion are evidently such fields. All
+theory is a subjective form given to an indeterminate material. The
+material is experience; and although each part of experience is, of
+course, perfectly definite in itself, and just that experience which it
+is, yet the recollection and relating together of the successive
+experiences is a function of the theoretical faculty. The systematic
+relations of things in time and space, and their dependence upon
+one another, are the work of our imagination. Theory can therefore
+never have the kind of truth which belongs to experience; as
+Hobbes has it, no discourse whatsoever can end in absolute
+knowledge of fact.
+
+It is conceivable that two different theories should be equally true
+in respect to the same facts. All that is required is that they should
+be equally complete schemes for the relation and prediction of the
+realities they deal with. The choice between them would be an
+arbitrary one, determined by personal bias, for the object being
+indeterminate, its elements can be apperceived as forming all kinds
+of unities. A theory is a form of apperception, and in applying it to
+the facts, although our first concern is naturally the adequacy of
+our instrument of comprehension, we are also influenced, more
+than we think, by the ease and pleasure with which we think in its
+terms, that is, by its beauty.
+
+The case of two alternative theories of nature, both exhaustive and
+adequate, may seem somewhat imaginary. The human mind is,
+indeed, not rich and indeterminate enough to drive, as the saying is,
+many horses abreast; it wishes to have one general scheme of
+conception only, under which it strives to bring everything. Yet the
+philosophers, who are the scouts of common sense, have come in
+sight of this possibility of a variety of methods of dealing with the
+same facts. As at the basis of evolution generally there are many
+variations, only some of which remain fixed, so at the origin of
+conception there are many schemes; these are simultaneously
+developed, and at most stages of thought divide the intelligence
+among themselves. So much is thought of on one principle -- say
+mechanically -- and so much on another -- say teleologically. In
+those minds only that have a speculative turn, that is, in whom the
+desire for unity of comprehension outruns practical exigencies,
+does the conflict become intolerable. In them one or another of
+these theories tends to swallow all experience, but is commonly
+incapable of doing so.
+
+The final victory of a single philosophy is not yet won, because
+none as yet has proved adequate to all experience. If ever unity
+should be attained, our unanimity would not indicate that, as the
+popular fancy conceives it, the truth had been discovered; it would
+only indicate that the human mind had found a definitive way of
+classifying its experience. Very likely, if man still retained his
+inveterate habit of hypostatizing his ideas, that definitive scheme
+would be regarded as a representation of the objective relations of
+things; but no proof that it was so would ever be found, nor even
+any hint that there were external objects, not to speak of relations
+between them. As the objects are hypostatized percepts, so the
+relations are hypostatized processes of the human understanding.
+
+To have reached a final philosophy would be only to have
+formulated the typical and satisfying form of human apperception;
+the view would remain a theory, an instrument of comprehension
+and survey fitted to the human eye; it would be for ever utterly
+heterogeneous from fact, utterly unrepresentative of any of those
+experiences which it would artificially connect and weave into a
+pattern. Mythology and theology are the most striking illustrations
+of this human method of incorporating much diffuse experience
+into graphic and picturesque ideas; but steady reflection will hardly
+allow us to see anything else in the theories of science and
+philosophy. These, too, are creatures of our intelligence, and have
+their only being in the movement of our thought, as they have their
+only justification in their fitness to our experience.
+
+Long before we can attain, however, the ideal unification of
+experience under one theory, the various fields of thought demand
+provisional surveys; we are obliged to reflect on life in a variety of
+detached and unrelated acts, since neither can the whole material
+of life be ever given while we still live, nor can that which is given
+be impartially retained in the human memory. When omniscience
+was denied us, we were endowed with versatility. The picturesqueness
+of human thought may console us for its imperfection.
+
+History, for instance, which passes for the account of facts, is in
+reality a collection of apperceptions of an indeterminate material;
+for even the material of history is not fact, but consists of
+memories and words subject to ever-varying interpretation. No
+historian can be without bias, because the bias defines the history.
+The memory in the first place is selective; official and other
+records are selective, and often intentionally partial. Monuments
+and ruins remain by chance. And when the historian has set
+himself to study these few relics of the past, the work of his own
+intelligence begins. He must have some guiding interest. A history
+is not an indiscriminate register of every known event; a file of
+newspapers is not an inspiration of Clio. A history is a view of the
+fortunes of some institution or person; it traces the development of
+some interest. This interest furnishes the standard by which the
+facts are selected, and their importance gauged. Then, after the
+facts are thus chosen, marshalled, and emphasized, comes the
+indication of causes and relations; and in this part of his work the
+historian plunges avowedly into speculation, and becomes a
+philosophical poet. Everything will then depend on his genius, on
+his principles, on his passions, -- in a word, on his apperceptive
+forms. And the value of history is similar to that of poetry, and
+varies with the beauty, power, and adequacy of the form in which
+the indeterminate material of human life is presented.
+
+_Further dangers of indeterminateness._
+
+§ 35. The fondness of a race or epoch for any kind of effect is a
+natural expression of temperament and circumstances, and cannot
+be blamed or easily corrected. At the same time we may stop to
+consider some of the disadvantages of a taste for the indeterminate.
+We shall be registering a truth and at the same time, perhaps,
+giving some encouragement to that rebellion which we may
+inwardly feel against this too prevalent manner. The indeterminate
+is by its nature ambiguous; it is therefore obscure and uncertain in
+its effect, and if used, as in many arts it often is, to convey a
+meaning, must fail to do so unequivocally. Where a meaning is not
+to be conveyed, as in landscape, architecture, or music, the
+illusiveness of the form is not so objectionable: although in all
+these objects the tendency to observe forms and to demand them is
+a sign of increasing appreciation. The ignorant fail to see the forms
+of music, architecture, and landscape, and therefore are insensible
+to relative rank and technical values in these spheres; they regard
+the objects only as so many stimuli to emotion, as soothing or
+enlivening influences. But the sensuous and associative values of
+these things -- especially of music -- are so great, that even without
+an appreciation of form considerable beauty may be found in them.
+
+In literature, however, where the sensuous value of the words is
+comparatively small, indeterminateness of form is fatal to beauty,
+and, if extreme, even to expressiveness. For meaning is conveyed
+by the _form_ and order of words, not by the words themselves,
+and no precision of meaning can be reached without precision of
+style. Therefore no respectable writer is voluntarily obscure in the
+structure of his phrases -- that is an abuse reserved for the clowns
+of literary fashion. But a book is a larger sentence, and if it is
+formless it fails to mean anything, for the same reason that an
+unformed collection of words means nothing. The chapters and
+verses may have said something, as loose words may have a
+known sense and a tone; but the book will have brought no
+message.
+
+In fact, the absence of form in composition has two stages: that in
+which, as in the works of Emerson, significant fragments are
+collected, and no system, no total thought, constructed out of them;
+and secondly, that in which, as in the writings of the Symbolists of
+our time, all the significance is kept back in the individual words,
+or even in the syllables that compose them. This mosaic of
+word-values has, indeed, a possibility of effect, for the absence of form
+does not destroy materials, but, as we have observed, rather allows
+the attention to remain fixed upon them; and for this reason
+absence of sense is a means of accentuating beauty of sound and
+verbal suggestion. But this example shows how the tendency to
+neglect structure in literature is a tendency to surrender the use of
+language as an instrument of thought The descent is easy from
+ambiguity to meaninglessness.
+
+The indeterminate in form is also indeterminate in value. It needs
+completion by the mind of the observer and as this completion
+differs, the value of the result must vary. An indeterminate object
+is therefore beautiful to him who can make it so, and ugly to him
+who cannot. It appeals to a few and to them diversely. In fact, the
+observer's own mind is the storehouse from which the beautiful
+form has to be drawn. If the form is not there, it cannot be applied
+to the half-finished object; it is like asking a man without skill to
+complete another man's composition. The indeterminate object
+therefore requires an active and well-equipped mind, and is
+otherwise without value.
+
+It is furthermore unprofitable even to the mind which takes it up; it
+stimulates that mind to action, but it presents it with no new object.
+We can respond only with those forms of apperception which we
+already are accustomed to. A formless object cannot _inform_ the
+mind, cannot mould it to a new habit. That happens only when the
+data, by their clear determination, compel the eye and imagination
+to follow new paths and see new relations. Then we are introduced
+to a new beauty, and enriched to that extent. But the indeterminate,
+like music to the sentimental, is a vague stimulus. It calls forth at
+random such ideas and memories as may lie to hand, stirring the
+mind, but leaving it undisciplined and unacquainted with any new
+object. This stirring, like that of the pool of Bethesda, may indeed
+have its virtue. A creative mind, already rich in experience and
+observation, may, under the influence of such a stimulus, dart into
+a new thought, and give birth to that with which it is already
+pregnant; but the fertilizing seed came from elsewhere, from study
+and admiration of those definite forms which nature contains, or
+which art, in imitation of nature, has conceived and brought to
+perfection.
+
+_Illusion of infinite perfection._
+
+§ 36. The great advantage, then, of indeterminate organization is
+that it cultivates that spontaneity, intelligence, and imagination
+without which many important objects would remain unintelligible,
+and because unintelligible, uninteresting. The beauty of landscape,
+the forms of religion and science, the types of human nature itself,
+are due to this apperceptive gift. Without it we should have a chaos;
+but its patient and ever-fresh activity carves out of the fluid
+material a great variety of forms. An object which stimulates us to
+this activity, therefore, seems often to be more sublime and
+beautiful than one which presents to us a single unchanging form,
+however perfect. There seems to be a life and infinity in
+the incomplete, which the determinate excludes by its own
+completeness and petrifaction. And yet the effort in this very
+activity is to reach determination; we can only see beauty in so far
+as we introduce form. The instability of the form can be no
+advantage to a work of art; the determinate keeps constantly what
+the indeterminate reaches only in those moments in which the
+observer's imagination is especially propitious. If we feel a certain
+disappointment in the monotonous limits of a definite form and its
+eternal, unsympathizing message, might we not feel much more
+the melancholy transiency of those glimpses of beauty which elude
+us in the indeterminate? Might not the torment and uncertainty of
+this contemplation, with the self-consciousness it probably
+involves, more easily tire us than the quiet companionship of a
+constant object? May we not prefer the unchangeable to the
+irrecoverable?
+
+We may; and the preference is one which we should all more
+clearly feel, were it not for an illusion, proper to the romantic
+temperament, which lends a mysterious charm to things which are
+indefinite and indefinable. It is the suggestion of infinite perfection.
+In reality, perfection is a synonym of finitude. Neither in nature
+nor in the fancy can anything be perfect except by realizing a
+definite type, which excludes all variation, and contrasts sharply
+with every other possibility of being. There is no perfection apart
+from a form of apperception or type; and there are as many kinds
+of perfection as there are types or forms of apperception latent in
+the mind.
+
+Now these various perfections are mutually exclusive. Only in a
+kind of aesthetic orgy -- in the madness of an intoxicated
+imagination -- can we confuse them. As the Roman emperor
+wished that the Roman people had but a single neck, to murder
+them at one blow, so we may sometimes wish that all beauties had
+but one form, that we might behold them together. But in the
+nature of things beauties are incompatible. The spring cannot
+coexist with the autumn, nor day with night; what is beautiful in a
+child is hideous in a man, and _vice versa;_ every age,
+every country, each sex, has a peculiar beauty, finite and
+incommunicable; the better it is attained the more completely it
+excludes every other. The same is evidently true of schools of art,
+of styles and languages, and of every effect whatsoever. It exists
+by its finitude and is great in proportion to its determination.
+
+But there is a loose and somewhat helpless state of mind in which
+while we are incapable of realizing any particular thought or vision
+in its perfect clearness and absolute beauty, we nevertheless feel its
+haunting presence in the background of consciousness. And one
+reason why the idea cannot emerge from that obscurity is that it is
+not alone in the brain; a thousand other ideals, a thousand other
+plastic tendencies of thought, simmer there in confusion; and if any
+definite image is presented in response to that vague agitation of
+our soul, we feel its inadequacy to our need in spite of, or perhaps
+on account of, its own particular perfection. We then say that the
+classic does not satisfy us, and that the "Grecian cloys us with his
+perfectness." We are not capable of that concentrated and serious
+attention to one thing at a time which would enable us to sink into
+its being, and enjoy the intrinsic harmonies of its form, and the
+bliss of its immanent particular heaven; we flounder in the vague,
+but at the same time we are full of yearnings, of half-thoughts and
+semi-visions, and the upward tendency and exaltation of our mood
+is emphatic and overpowering in proportion to our incapacity to
+think, speak, or imagine.
+
+The sum of our incoherences has, however, an imposing volume
+and even, perhaps, a vague, general direction. We feel ourselves
+laden with an infinite burden; and what delights us most and seems
+to us to come nearest to the ideal is not what embodies any one
+possible form, but that which, by embodying none, suggests many,
+and stirs the mass of our inarticulate imagination with a pervasive
+thrill. Each thing, without being a beauty in itself, by stimulating
+our indeterminate emotion, seems to be a hint and expression of
+infinite beauty. That infinite perfection which cannot be realized,
+because it is self-contradictory, may be thus suggested, and on
+account of this suggestion an indeterminate effect may be regarded
+as higher, more significant, and more beautiful than any
+determinate one.
+
+The illusion, however, is obvious. The infinite perfection
+suggested is an absurdity. What exists is a vague emotion, the
+objects of which, if they could emerge from the chaos of a
+confused imagination, would turn out to be a multitude of
+differently beautiful determinate things. This emotion of infinite
+perfection is the _materia prima -- rudis indigestaque moles --_ out
+of which attention, inspiration, and art can bring forth an infinity of
+particular perfections. Every aesthetic success, whether in
+contemplation or production, is the birth of one of these
+possibilities with which the sense of infinite perfection is pregnant.
+A work of art or an act of observation which remains indeterminate
+is, therefore, a failure, however much it may stir our emotion. It is
+a failure for two reasons. In the first place this emotion is seldom
+wholly pleasant; it is disquieting and perplexing; it brings a desire
+rather than a satisfaction. And in the second place, the emotion, not
+being embodied, fails to constitute the beauty of anything; and
+what we have is merely a sentiment, a consciousness that values
+are or might be there, but a failure to extricate those values, or to
+make them explicit and recognizable in an appropriate object.
+
+These gropings after beauty have their worth as signs of aesthetic
+vitality and intimations of future possible accomplishment; but in
+themselves they are abortive, and mark the impotence of the
+imagination. Sentimentalism in the observer and romanticism in
+the artist are examples of this aesthetic incapacity. Whenever
+beauty is really seen and loved, it has a definite embodiment: the
+eye has precision, the work has style, and the object has perfection.
+The kind of perfection may indeed be new; and if the discovery of
+new perfections is to be called romanticism, then romanticism is
+the beginning of all aesthetic life. But if by romanticism we mean
+indulgence in confused suggestion and in the exhibition of turgid
+force, then there is evidently need of education, of attentive labour,
+to disentangle the beauties so vaguely felt, and give each its
+adequate embodiment. The breadth of our inspiration need not be
+lost in this process of clarification, for there is no limit to the
+number and variety of forms which the world may be made to wear;
+only, if it is to be appreciated as beautiful and not merely felt as
+unutterable, it must be seen as a kingdom of forms. Thus the works
+of Shakespeare give us a great variety, with a frequent marvellous
+precision of characterization, and the forms of his art are definite
+although its scope is great.
+
+But by a curious anomaly, we are often expected to see the greatest
+expressiveness in what remains indeterminate, and in reality
+expresses nothing. As we have already observed, the sense of
+profundity and significance is a very detachable emotion; it can
+accompany a confused jumble of promptings quite as easily as it
+can a thorough comprehension of reality. The illusion of infinite
+perfection is peculiarly apt to produce this sensation. That illusion
+arises by the simultaneous awakening of many incipient thoughts
+and dim ideas; it stirs the depths of the mind as a wind stirs the
+thickets of a forest; and the unusual consciousness of the life and
+longing of the soul, brought by that gust of feeling, makes us
+recognize in the object a singular power, a mysterious meaning.
+
+But the feeling of significance signifies little. All we have in this
+case is a potentiality of imagination; and only when this
+potentiality begins to be realized in definite ideas, does a real
+meaning, or any object which that meaning can mean, arise in the
+mind. The highest aesthetic good is not that vague potentiality, nor
+that contradictory, infinite perfection so strongly desired; it is the
+greatest number and variety of finite perfections. To learn to see in
+nature and to enshrine in the arts the typical forms of things; to
+study and recognize their variations; to domesticate the
+imagination in the world, so that everywhere beauty can be seen,
+and a hint found for artistic creation, -- that is the goal of
+contemplation. Progress lies in the direction of discrimination and
+precision, not in that of formless emotion and reverie.
+
+_Organized nature the source of apperceptive forms; example of
+sculpture._
+
+§ 37. The form of the material world is in one sense always
+perfectly definite, since the particles that compose it are at each
+moment in a given relative position; but a world that had no other
+form than that of such a constellation of atoms would remain
+chaotic to our perception, because we should not be able to survey
+it as a whole, or to keep our attention suspended evenly over its
+innumerable parts. According to evolutionary theory, mechanical
+necessity has, however, brought about a distribution and
+aggregation of elements such as, for our purposes, constitutes
+individual things. Certain systems of atoms move together as units;
+and these organisms reproduce themselves and recur so often in
+our environment, that our senses become accustomed to view their
+parts together. Their form becomes a natural and recognizable one.
+An order and sequence is established in our imagination by virtue
+of the order and sequence in which the corresponding impressions
+have come to our senses. We can remember, reproduce, and in
+reproducing vary, by kaleidoscopic tricks of the fancy, the forms in
+which our perceptions have come.
+
+The mechanical organization of external nature is thus the source
+of apperceptive forms in the mind. Did not sensation, by a constant
+repetition of certain sequences, and a recurring exactitude of
+mathematical relations, keep our fancy clear and fresh, we should
+fall into an imaginative lethargy. Idealization would degenerate
+into indistinctness, and, by the dulling of our memory, we should
+dream a world daily more poor and vague.
+
+This process is periodically observable in the history of the arts.
+The way in which the human figure, for instance, is depicted, is an
+indication of the way in which it is apperceived. The arts give back
+only so much of nature as the human eye has been able to master.
+The most primitive stage of drawing and sculpture presents man
+with his arms and legs, his ten fingers and ten toes, branching out
+into mid-air; the apperception of the body has been evidently
+practical and successive, and the artist sets down what he knows
+rather than any of the particular perceptions that conveyed that
+knowledge. Those perceptions are merged and lost in the haste to
+reach the practically useful concept of the object. By a naïve
+expression of the same principle, we find in some Assyrian
+drawings the eye seen from the front introduced into a face seen in
+profile, each element being represented in that form in which it
+was most easily observed and remembered. The development of
+Greek sculpture furnishes a good example of the gradual
+penetration of nature into the mind, of the slowly enriched
+apperception of the object. The quasi-Egyptian stiffness melts
+away, first from the bodies of the minor figures, afterwards of
+those of the gods, and finally the face is varied, and the hieratic
+smile almost disappears.[10]
+
+But this progress has a near limit; once the most beautiful and
+inclusive apperception reached, once the best form caught at its
+best moment, the artist seems to have nothing more to do. To
+reproduce the imperfections of individuals seems wrong, when
+beauty, after all, is the thing desired. And the ideal, as caught by
+the master's inspiration, is more beautiful than anything his pupils
+can find for themselves in nature. From its summit, the art
+therefore declines in one of two directions. It either becomes
+academic, forsakes the study of nature, and degenerates into empty
+convention, or else it becomes ignoble, forsakes beauty, and sinks
+into a tasteless and unimaginative technique. The latter was the
+course of sculpture in ancient times, the former, with moments of
+reawakening, has been its dreadful fate among the moderns.
+
+This reawakening has come whenever there has been a return to
+nature, for a new form of apperception and a new ideal. Of this
+return there is continual need in all the arts; without it our
+apperceptions grow thin and worn, and subject to the sway of
+tradition and fashion. We continue to judge about beauty, but we
+give up looking for it. The remedy is to go back to the reality, to
+study it patiently, to allow new aspects of it to work upon the mind,
+sink into it, and beget there an imaginative offspring after their
+own kind. Then a new art can appear, which, having the same
+origin in admiration for nature which the old art had, may hope to
+attain the same excellence in a new direction.
+
+In fact, one of the dangers to which a modern artist is exposed is
+the seduction of his predecessors. The gropings of our muse, the
+distracted experiments of our architecture, often arise from the
+attraction of some historical school; we cannot work out our own
+style because we are hampered by the beauties of so many others.
+The result is an eclecticism, which, in spite of its great historical
+and psychological interest, is without aesthetic unity or permanent
+power to please. Thus the study of many schools of art may
+become an obstacle to proficiency in any.
+
+_Utility the principle of organization in nature._
+
+§ 38. Utility (or, as it is now called, adaptation, and natural
+selection) organizes the material world into definite species and
+individuals. Only certain aggregations of matter are in equilibrium
+with the prevailing forces of the environment. Gravity, for instance,
+is in itself a chaotic force; it pulls all particles indiscriminately
+together without reference to the wholes into which the human eye
+may have grouped them. But the result is not chaos, because matter
+arranged in some ways is welded together by the very tendency
+which disintegrates it when arranged in other forms. These forms,
+selected by their congruity with gravity, are therefore fixed in
+nature, and become types. Thus the weight of the stones keeps the
+pyramid standing: here a certain shape has become a guarantee of
+permanence in the presence of a force in itself mechanical and
+undiscriminating. It is the utility of the pyramidal form -- its fitness
+to stand -- that has made it a type in building. The Egyptians
+merely repeated a process that they might have observed going on
+of itself in nature, who builds a pyramid in every hill, not indeed
+because she wishes to, or because pyramids are in any way an
+object of her action, but because she has no force which can easily
+dislodge matter that finds itself in that shape.
+
+Such an accidental stability of structure is, in this moving world, a
+sufficient principle of permanence and individuality. The same
+mechanical principles, in more complex applications, insure the
+persistence of animal forms and prevent any permanent deviation
+from them. What is called the principle of self-preservation, and
+the final causes and substantial forms of the Aristotelian
+philosophy, are descriptions of the result of this operation. The
+tendency of everything to maintain and propagate its nature is
+simply the inertia of a stable juxtaposition of elements, which are
+not enough disturbed by ordinary accidents to lose their
+equilibrium; while the incidence of a too great disturbance causes
+that disruption we call death, or that variation of type, which, on
+account of its incapacity to establish itself permanently, we call
+abnormal.
+
+Nature thus organizes herself into recognizable species; and the
+aesthetic eye, studying her forms, tends, as we have already shown,
+to bring the type within even narrower limits than do the external
+exigencies of life.
+
+_The relation of utility to beauty._
+
+§ 39. This natural harmony between utility and beauty, when its
+origin is not understood, is of course the subject of much perplexed
+and perplexing theory. Sometimes we are told that utility is itself
+the essence of beauty, that is, that our consciousness of the
+practical advantages of certain forms is the ground of our aesthetic
+admiration of them. The horse's legs are said to be beautiful
+because they are fit to run, the eye because it is made to see, the
+house because it is convenient to live in. An amusing application --
+which might pass for a _reductio ad absurdum,_ -- of this dense
+theory is put by Xenophon into the mouth of Socrates. Comparing
+himself with a youth present at the same banquet, who was about
+to receive the prize of beauty, Socrates declares himself more
+beautiful and more worthy of the crown. For utility makes beauty,
+and eyes bulging out from the head like his are the most
+advantageous for seeing; nostrils wide and open to the air, like his,
+most appropriate for smell; and a mouth large and voluminous, like
+his, best fitted for both eating and kissing.[11]
+
+Now since these things are, in fact, hideous, the theory that shows
+they _ought to be_ beautiful, is vain and ridiculous. But that
+theory contains this truth: that had the utility of Socratic features
+been so great that men of all other type must have perished,
+Socrates would have been beautiful. He would have represented
+the human type. The eye would have been then accustomed to that
+form, the imagination would have taken it as the basis of its
+refinements, and accentuated its naturally effective points. The
+beautiful does not depend on the useful; it is constituted by the
+imagination in ignorance and contempt of practical advantage; but
+it is not independent of the necessary, for the necessary must also
+be the habitual and consequently the basis of the type, and of all its
+imaginative variations.
+
+There are, moreover, at a late and derivative stage in our aesthetic
+judgment, certain cases in which the knowledge of fitness and
+utility enters into our sense of beauty. But it does so very indirectly,
+rather by convincing us that we should tolerate what practical
+conditions have imposed on an artist, by arousing admiration of his
+ingenuity, or by suggesting the interesting things themselves with
+which the object is known to be connected. Thus a cottage-chimney,
+stout and tall, with the smoke floating from it, pleases because
+we fancy it to mean a hearth, a rustic meal, and a comfortable
+family. But that is all extraneous association. The most
+ordinary way in which utility affects us is negatively; if we
+know a thing to be useless and fictitious, the uncomfortable
+haunting sense of waste and trickery prevents all enjoyment, and
+therefore banishes beauty. But this is also an adventitious
+complication. The intrinsic value of a form is in no way affected by it.
+
+Opposed to this utilitarian theory stands the metaphysical one that
+would make the beauty or intrinsic rightness of things the source of
+their efficiency and of their power to survive. Taken literally, as it
+is generally meant, this idea must, from our point of view, appear
+preposterous. Beauty and rightness are relative to our judgment
+and emotion; they in no sense exist in nature or preside over her.
+She everywhere appears to move by mechanical law. The types of
+things exist by what, in relation to our approbation, is mere chance,
+and it is our faculties that must adapt themselves to our
+environment and not our environment to our faculties. Such is the
+naturalistic point of view which we have adopted.
+
+To say, however, that beauty is in some sense the ground of
+practical fitness, need not seem to us wholly unmeaning. The fault
+of the Platonists who say things of this sort is seldom that of
+emptiness. They have an intuition; they have sometimes a strong
+sense of the facts of consciousness. But they turn their discoveries
+into so many revelations, and the veil of the infinite and absolute
+soon covers their little light of specific truth. Sometimes, after
+patient digging, the student comes upon the treasure of some
+simple fact, some common experience, beneath all their mystery
+and unction. And so it may be in this case. If we make allowances
+for the tendency to express experience in allegory and myth, we
+shall see that the idea of beauty and rationality presiding over
+nature and guiding her, as it were, for their own greater glory, is a
+projection and a writing large of a psychological principle.
+
+The mind that perceives nature is the same that understands and
+enjoys her; indeed, these three functions are really elements of one
+process. There is therefore in the mere perceptibility of a thing a
+certain prophecy of its beauty; if it were not on the road to beauty,
+if it had no approach to fitness to our faculties of perception, the
+object would remain eternally unperceived. The sense, therefore,
+that the whole world is made to be food for the soul; that beauty is
+not only its own, but all things' excuse for being; that universal
+aspiration towards perfection is the key and secret of the world, --
+that sense is the poetical reverberation of a psychological fact -- of
+the fact that our mind is an organism tending to unity, to
+unconsciousness of what is refractory to its action, and to
+assimilation and sympathetic transformation of what is kept within
+its sphere. The idea that nature could be governed by an aspiration
+towards beauty is, therefore, to be rejected as a confusion, but at
+the same time we must confess that this confusion is founded on a
+consciousness of the subjective relation between the perceptibility,
+rationality, and beauty of things.
+
+_Utility the principle of organization in the arts._
+
+§ 40. This subjective relation is, however, exceedingly loose. Most
+things that are perceivable are not perceived so distinctly as to be
+intelligible, nor so delightfully as to be beautiful. If our eye had
+infinite penetration, or our imagination infinite elasticity, this
+would not be the case; to see would then be to understand and to
+enjoy. As it is, the degree of determination needed for perception is
+much less than that needed for comprehension or ideality. Hence
+there is room for hypothesis and for art. As hypothesis organizes
+experiences imaginatively in ways in which observation has not
+been able to do, so art organizes objects in ways to which nature,
+perhaps, has never condescended.
+
+The chief thing which the imitative arts add to nature is
+permanence, the lack of which is the saddest defect of many
+natural beauties. The forces which determine natural forms,
+therefore, determine also the forms of the imitative arts. But the
+non-imitative arts supply organisms different in kind from those
+which nature affords. If we seek the principle by which these
+objects are organized, we shall generally find that it is likewise
+utility. Architecture, for instance, has all its forms suggested by
+practical demands. Use requires our buildings to assume certain
+determinate forms; the mechanical properties of our materials, the
+exigency of shelter, light, accessibility, economy, and convenience,
+dictate the arrangements of our buildings.
+
+Houses and temples have an evolution like that of animals and
+plants. Various forms arise by mechanical necessity, like the cave,
+or the shelter of overhanging boughs. These are perpetuated by a
+selection in which the needs and pleasures of man are the
+environment to which the structure must be adapted. Determinate
+forms thus establish themselves, and the eye becomes accustomed
+to them. The line of use, by habit of apperception, becomes the line
+of beauty. A striking example may be found in the pediment of the
+Greek temple and the gable of the northern house. The exigencies
+of climate determine these forms differently, but the eye in each
+case accepts what utility imposes. We admire height in one and
+breadth in the other, and we soon find the steep pediment heavy
+and the low gable awkward and mean.
+
+It would be an error, however, to conclude that habit alone
+establishes the right proportion in these various types of building.
+We have the same intrinsic elements to consider as in natural
+forms. That is, besides the unity of type and correspondence of
+parts which custom establishes, there are certain appeals to more
+fundamental susceptibilities of the human eye and imagination.
+There is, for instance, the value of abstract form, determined by the
+pleasantness and harmony of implicated retinal or muscular
+tensions. Different structures contain or suggest more or less of
+this kind of beauty, and in that proportion may be called
+intrinsically better or worse. Thus artificial forms may be arranged
+in a hierarchy like natural ones, by reference to the absolute values
+of their contours and masses. Herein lies the superiority of a Greek
+to a Chinese vase, or of Gothic to Saracenic construction. Thus
+although every useful form is capable of proportion and beauty,
+when once its type is established, we cannot say that this beauty is
+always potentially equal; and an iron bridge, for instance, although
+it certainly possesses and daily acquires aesthetic interest, will
+probably never, on the average, equal a bridge of stone.
+
+_Form and adventitious ornament._
+
+§ 41. Beauty of form is the last to be found or admired in artificial
+as in natural objects. Time is needed to establish it, and training
+and nicety of perception to enjoy it. Motion or colour is what first
+interests a child in toys, as in animals; and the barbarian artist
+decorates long before he designs. The cave and wigwam are
+daubed with paint, or hung with trophies, before any pleasure is
+taken in their shape; and the appeal to the detached senses, and to
+associations of wealth and luxury, precedes by far the appeal to the
+perceptive harmonies of form. In music we observe the same
+gradation; first, we appreciate its sensuous and sentimental value;
+only with education can we enjoy its form. The plastic arts begin,
+therefore, with adventitious ornament and with symbolism. The
+aesthetic pleasure is in the richness of the material, the profusion of
+the ornament, the significance of the shape -- in everything, rather
+than in the shape itself.
+
+We have accordingly, in works of art two independent sources of
+effect. The first is the useful form, which generates the type, and
+ultimately the beauty of form, when the type has been idealized by
+emphasizing its intrinsically pleasing traits. The second is the
+beauty of ornament, which comes from the excitement of the
+senses, or of the imagination, by colour, or by profusion or
+delicacy of detail. Historically, the latter is first developed, and
+applied to a form as yet merely useful. But the very presence of
+ornament attracts contemplation; the attention lavished on the
+object helps to fix its form in the mind, and to make us
+discriminate the less from the more graceful. The two kinds of
+beauty are then felt, and, yielding to that tendency to unity which
+the mind always betrays, we begin to subordinate and organize
+these two excellences. The ornament is distributed so as to
+emphasize the aesthetic essence of the form; to idealize it even
+more, by adding adventitious interests harmoniously to the
+intrinsic interest of the lines of structure.
+
+There is here a great field, of course, for variety of combination
+and compromise. Some artists are fascinated by the decoration, and
+think of the structure merely as the background on which it can be
+most advantageously displayed. Others, of more austere taste,
+allow ornament only to emphasize the main lines of the design, or
+to conceal such inharmonious elements as nature or utility may
+prevent them from eliminating.[12] We may thus oscillate between
+decorative and structural motives, and only in one point, for each
+style, can we find the ideal equilibrium, in which the greatest
+strength and lucidity is combined with the greatest splendour.
+
+A less subtle, but still very effective, combination is that hit upon
+by many oriental and Gothic architects, and found, also, by
+accident perhaps, in many buildings of the plateresque style; the
+ornament and structure are both presented with extreme emphasis,
+but locally divided; a vast rough wall, for instance, represents the
+one, and a profusion of mad ornament huddled around a central
+door or window represents the other.
+
+Gothic architecture offers us in the pinnacle and flying buttress a
+striking example of the adoption of a mechanical feature, and its
+transformation into an element of beauty. Nothing could at first
+sight be more hopeless than the external half-arch propping the
+side of a pier, or the chimney-like weight of stones pressing it
+down from above; but a courageous acceptance of these necessities,
+and a submissive study of their form, revealed a new and strange
+effect: the bewildering and stimulating intricacy of masses
+suspended in mid-air; the profusion of line, variety of surface, and
+picturesqueness of light and shade. It needed but a little applied
+ornament judiciously distributed; a moulding in the arches; a florid
+canopy and statue amid the buttresses; a few grinning monsters
+leaning out of unexpected nooks; a leafy budding of the topmost
+pinnacles; a piercing here and there of some little gallery, parapet,
+or turret into lacework against the sky -- and the building became a
+poem, an inexhaustible emotion. Add some passing cloud casting
+its moving shadow over the pile, add the circling of birds about the
+towers, and you have an unforgettable type of beauty; not perhaps
+the noblest, sanest, or most enduring, but one for the existence of
+which the imagination is richer, and the world more interesting.
+
+In this manner we accept the forms imposed upon us by utility, and
+train ourselves to apperceive their potential beauty. Familiarity
+breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention. When the mind is
+absorbed and dominated by its perceptions, it incorporates into
+them more and more of its own functional values, and makes them
+ultimately beautiful and expressive. Thus no language can be ugly
+to those who speak it well, no religion unmeaning to those who
+have learned to pour their life into its moulds.
+
+Of course these forms vary in intrinsic excellence; they are by their
+specific character more or less fit and facile for the average mind.
+But the man and the age are rare who can choose their own path;
+we have generally only a choice between going ahead in the
+direction already chosen, or halting and blocking the path for
+others. The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from
+within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the
+traditional forms. Disaster follows rebellion against tradition or
+against utility, which are the basis and root of our taste and
+progress. But, within the given school, and as exponents of its
+spirit, we can adapt and perfect our works, if haply we are better
+inspired than our predecessors. For the better we know a given
+thing, and the more we perceive its strong and weak points, the
+more capable we are of idealizing it.
+
+_Form in words._
+
+§ 42. The main effect of language consists in its meaning, in the
+ideas which it expresses. But no expression is possible without a
+presentation, and this presentation must have a form. This form of
+the instrument of expression is itself an element of effect, although
+in practical life we may overlook it in our haste to attend to the
+meaning it conveys. It is, moreover, a condition of the kind of
+expression possible, and often determines the manner in which the
+object suggested shall be apperceived. No word has the exact value
+of any other in the same or in another language.[13] But the
+intrinsic effect of language does not stop there. The single word is
+but a stage in the series of formations which constitute language,
+and which preserve for men the fruit of their experience, distilled
+and concentrated into a symbol.
+
+This formation begins with the elementary sounds themselves,
+which have to be discriminated and combined to make recognizable
+symbols. The evolution of these symbols goes on spontaneously,
+suggested by our tendency to utter all manner of sounds,
+and preserved by the ease with which the ear discriminates
+these sounds when made. Speech would be an absolute and
+unrelated art, like music, were it not controlled by utility. The
+sounds have indeed no resemblance to the objects they symbolize;
+but before the system of sounds can represent the system of objects,
+there has to be a correspondence in the groupings of both. The
+structure of language, unlike that of music, thus becomes a mirror
+of the structure of the world as presented to the intelligence.
+
+Grammar, philosophically studied, is akin to the deepest
+metaphysics, because in revealing the constitution of speech, it
+reveals the constitution of thought, and the hierarchy of those
+categories by which we conceive the world. It is by virtue of this
+parallel development that language has its function of expressing
+experience with exactness, and the poet -- to whom language is an
+instrument of art -- has to employ it also with a constant reference
+to meaning and veracity; that is, he must be a master of experience
+before he can become a true master of words. Nevertheless,
+language is primarily a sort of music, and the beautiful effects
+which it produces are due to its own structure, giving, as it
+crystallizes in a new fashion, an unforeseen form to experience.
+
+Poets may be divided into two classes: the musicians and the
+psychologists. The first are masters of significant language
+as harmony; they know what notes to sound together and in
+succession; they can produce, by the marshalling of sounds and
+images, by the fugue of passion and the snap of wit, a thousand
+brilliant effects out of old materials. The Ciceronian orator, the
+epigrammatic, lyric, and elegiac poets, give examples of this art.
+The psychologists, on the other hand, gain their effect not by the
+intrinsic mastery of language, but by the closer adaptation of it to
+things. The dramatic poets naturally furnish an illustration.
+
+But however transparent we may wish to make our language,
+however little we may call for its intrinsic effects, and direct our
+attention exclusively to its expressiveness, we cannot avoid the
+limitations of our particular medium. The character of the tongue a
+man speaks, and the degree of his skill in speaking it, must always
+count enormously in the aesthetic value of his compositions; no
+skill in observation, no depth of thought or feeling, but is spoiled
+by a bad style and enhanced by a good one. The diversities of
+tongues and their irreducible aesthetic values, begins with the very
+sound of the letters, with the mode of utterance, and the
+characteristic inflections of the voice; notice, for instance, the
+effect of the French of these lines of Alfred de Musset,
+
+     Jamais deux yeux plus doux n'ont du ciel le plus pur
+     Sondé la profondeur et réfléchi l'azur.
+
+and compare with its flute-like and treble quality the breadth, depth,
+and volume of the German in this inimitable stanza of Goethe's:
+
+     Ueber alien Gipfeln
+     Ist Ruh,
+     In allen Wipfeln
+     Spürest du
+     Kaum einen Hauch;
+     Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
+     Warte nur, balde
+     Ruhest du auch.
+
+Even if the same tune could be played on both these vocal
+instruments, the difference in their _timbre_ would make the value
+of the melody entirely distinct in each case.
+
+_Syntactical form._
+
+§ 43. The known impossibility of adequate translation appears here
+at the basis of language. The other diversities are superadded upon
+this diversity of sound. The syntax is the next source of effect.
+What could be better than Homer, or what worse than almost any
+translation of him? And this holds even of languages so closely
+allied as the Indo-European, which, after all, have certain
+correspondences of syntax and inflection. If there could be a
+language with other parts of speech than ours, -- a language
+without nouns, for instance, -- how would that grasp of experience,
+that picture of the world, which all our literature contains, be
+reproduced in it? Whatever beauties that language might be
+susceptible of, none of the effects produced on us, I will not say by
+poets, but even by nature itself, could be expressed in it.
+
+Nor is such a language inconceivable. Instead of summarizing all
+our experiences of a thing by one word, its name, we should have
+to recall by appropriate adjectives the various sensations we had
+received from it; the objects we think of would be disintegrated, or,
+rather, would never have been unified. For "sun," they would say
+"high, yellow, dazzling, round, slowly moving," and the
+enumeration of these qualities (as we call them), without any
+suggestion of a unity at their source, might give a more vivid, and
+profound, if more cumbrous, representation of the facts. But how
+could the machinery of such an imagination be capable of
+repeating the effects of ours, when the objects to us most obvious
+and real would be to those minds utterly indescribable?
+
+The same diversity appears in the languages we ordinarily know,
+only in a lesser degree. The presence or absence of case-endings in
+nouns and adjectives, their difference of gender, the richness of
+inflections in the verbs, the frequency of particles and conjunctions,
+-- all these characteristics make one language differ from another
+entirely in genius and capacity of expression. Greek is probably the
+best of all languages in melody, richness, elasticity, and simplicity;
+so much so, that in spite of its complex inflections, when once a
+vocabulary is acquired, it is more easy and natural for a modern
+than his ancestral Latin itself. Latin is the stiffer tongue; it is by
+nature at once laconic and grandiloquent, and the exceptional
+condensation and transposition of which it is capable make its
+effects entirely foreign to a modern, scarcely inflected, tongue.
+Take, for instance, these lines of Horace:
+
+          me tabula sacer
+     votiva paries indicat uvida
+     suspendisse potenti
+     vestimenta maris deo,
+
+or these of Lucretius:
+
+     Jauaque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator
+     Crebrius incassum magnum cecidisse laborem.
+
+What conglomerate plebeian speech of our time could utter the
+stately grandeur of these Lucretian words, every one of which is
+noble, and wears the toga?
+
+As a substitute for the inimitable interpenetration of the words in
+the Horatian strophe, we might have the external links of rhyme;
+and it seems, in fact, to be a justification of rhyme, that besides
+contributing something to melody and to the distribution of parts, it
+gives an artificial relationship to the phrases between which it
+obtains, which, but for it, would run away from one another in a
+rapid and irrevocable flux. In such a form as the sonnet, for
+instance, we have, by dint of assonance, a real unity forced upon
+the thought; for a sonnet in which the thought is not distributed
+appropriately to the structure of the verse, has no excuse for being
+a sonnet. By virtue of this interrelation of parts, the sonnet, the
+_non plus ultra_ of rhyme, is the most classic of modern poetical
+forms: much more classic in spirit than blank verse, which lacks
+almost entirely the power of synthesizing the phrase, and making
+the unexpected seem the inevitable.
+
+This beauty given to the ancients by the syntax of their language,
+the moderns can only attain by the combination of their rhymes. It
+is a bad substitute perhaps, but better than the total absence of form,
+favoured by the atomic character of our words, and the flat
+juxtaposition of our clauses. The art which was capable of making
+a gem of every prose sentence, -- the art which, carried, perhaps, to,
+a pitch at which it became too conscious, made the phrases of
+Tacitus a series of cameos, -- that art is inapplicable to our looser
+medium; we cannot give clay the finish and nicety of marble. Our
+poetry and speech in general, therefore, start out upon a lower level;
+the same effort will not, with this instrument, attain the same
+beauty. If equal beauty is ever attained, it comes from the wealth of
+suggestion, or the refinement of sentiment. The art of words
+remains hopelessly inferior. And what best proves this, is that
+when, as in our time, a reawakening of the love of beauty has
+prompted a refinement of our poetical language, we pass so soon
+into extravagance, obscurity, and affectation. Our modern
+languages are not susceptible of great formal beauty.
+
+_Literary form. The plot._
+
+§ 44. The forms of composition in verse and prose which are
+practised in each language are further organizations of words, and
+have formal values. The most exacting of these forms and that
+which has been carried to the greatest perfection is the drama; but
+it belongs to rhetoric and poetics to investigate the nature of these
+effects, and we have here sufficiently indicated the principle which
+underlies them. The plot, which Aristotle makes, and very justly,
+the most important element in the effect of a drama, is the formal
+element of the drama as such: the ethos and sentiments are the
+expression, and the versification, music, and stage settings are the
+materials. It is in harmony with the romantic tendency of modern
+times that modern dramatists -- Shakespeare as well as Molière,
+Calderon, and the rest -- excel in ethos rather than in plot; for it is
+the evident characteristic of modern genius to study and enjoy
+expression, -- the suggestion of the not-given, -- rather than form,
+the harmony of the given.
+
+Ethos is interesting mainly for the personal observations which it
+summarizes and reveals, or for the appeal to one's own actual or
+imaginative experience; it is portrait-painting, and enshrines
+something we love independently of the charm which at this
+moment and in this place it exercises over us. It appeals to our
+affections; it does not form them. But the plot is the synthesis of
+actions, and is a reproduction of those experiences from which our
+notion of men and things is originally derived; for character can
+never be observed in the world except as manifested in action.
+
+Indeed, it would be more fundamentally accurate to say that a
+character is a symbol and mental abbreviation for a peculiar set of
+acts, than to say that acts are a manifestation of character. For the
+acts are the data, and the character the inferred principle, and a
+principle, in spite of its name, is never more than a description _a
+posteriori,_ and a summary of what is subsumed under it. The plot,
+moreover, is what gives individuality to the play, and exercises
+invention; it is, as Aristotle again says, the most difficult portion of
+dramatic art, and that for which practice and training are most
+indispensable. And this plot, giving by its nature a certain picture
+of human experience, involves and suggests the ethos of its actors.
+
+What the great characterizes, like Shakespeare, do, is simply to
+elaborate and develope (perhaps far beyond the necessities of the
+plot) the suggestion of human individuality which that plot
+contains. It is as if, having drawn from daily observation some
+knowledge of the tempers of our friends, we represented them
+saying and doing all manner of ultra-characteristic things, and in
+an occasional soliloquy laying bare, even more clearly than by any
+possible action, that character which their observed behaviour had
+led us to impute to them. This is an ingenious and fascinating
+invention, and delights us with the clear discovery of a hidden
+personality; but the serious and equable development of a plot has
+a more stable worth in its greater similarity to life, which allows us
+to see other men's minds through the medium of events, and not
+events through the medium of other men's minds.
+
+_Character as an aesthetic form._
+
+§ 45. We have just come upon one of the unities most coveted in
+our literature, and most valued by us when attained, -- the portrait,
+the individuality, the character. The construction of a plot we call
+invention, but that of a character we dignify with the name of
+creation. It may therefore not be amiss, in finishing our discussion
+of form, to devote a few pages to the psychology of character-drawing.
+How does the unity we call a character arise, how is it described, and
+what is the basis of its effect?
+
+We may set it down at once as evident that we have here a case of
+the type: the similarities of various persons are amalgamated, their
+differences cancelled, and in the resulting percept those traits
+emphasized which have particularly pleased or interested us. This,
+in the abstract, may serve for a description of the origin of an idea
+of character quite as well as of an idea of physical form. But the
+different nature of the material -- the fact that a character is not a
+presentation to sense, but a rationalistic synthesis of successive
+acts and feelings, not combinable into any image -- makes such a
+description much more unsatisfying in this case than in that
+of material forms. We cannot understand exactly how these
+summations and cancellings take place when we are not dealing
+with a visible object. And we may even feel that there is a
+wholeness and inwardness about the development of certain ideal
+characters, that makes such a treatment of them fundamentally
+false and artificial. The subjective element, the spontaneous
+expression of our own passion and will, here counts for so much,
+that the creation of an ideal character becomes a new and peculiar
+problem.
+
+There is, however, a way of conceiving and delineating character
+which still bears a close resemblance to the process by which the
+imagination produces the type of any physical species. We may
+gather, for instance, about the nucleus of a word, designating some
+human condition or occupation, a number of detached observations.
+We may keep a note-book in our memory, or even in our pocket,
+with studious observations of the language, manners, dress, gesture,
+and history of the people _we_ meet, classifying our statistics
+under such heads as innkeepers, soldiers, housemaids, governesses,
+adventuresses, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Americans, actors,
+priests, and professors. And then, when occasion offers, to describe,
+or to put into a book or a play, any one of these types, all we have
+to do is to look over our notes, to select according to the needs of
+the moment, and if we are skilful in reproduction, to obtain by that
+means a life-like image of the sort of person we wish to represent.
+
+This process, which novelists and playwrights may go through
+deliberately, we all carry on involuntarily. At every moment
+experience is leaving in our minds some trait, some expression,
+some image, which will remain there attached to the name of a
+person, a class, or a nationality. Our likes and dislikes, our
+summary judgments on whole categories of men, are nothing but
+the distinct survival of some such impression. These traits have
+vivacity. If the picture they draw is one-sided and inadequate, the
+sensation they recall may be vivid, and suggestive of many other
+aspects of the thing. Thus the epithets in Homer, although they are
+often far from describing the essence of the object -- glankopis Athena
+enkeides Achaioi -- seem to recall a sensation, and to give
+vitality to the narrative. By bringing you, through one sense, into
+the presence of the object, they give you that same hint of further
+discovery, that same expectation of experience, which we have at
+the sight of whatever we call real.
+
+The graphic power of this method of observation and aggregation
+of characteristic traits is thus seen to be great. But it is not by this
+method that the most famous or most living characters have been
+conceived. This method gives the average, or at most the salient,
+points of the type, but the great characters of poetry -- a Hamlet, a
+Don Quixote, an Achilles -- are no averages, they are not even a
+collection of salient traits common to certain classes of men. They
+seem to be persons; that is, their actions and words seem to spring
+from the inward nature of an individual soul. Goethe is reported to
+have said that he conceived the character of his Gretchen entirely
+without observation of originals. And, indeed, he would probably
+not have found any. His creation rather is the original to which we
+may occasionally think we see some likeness in real maidens. It is
+the fiction here that is the standard of naturalness. And on this, as
+on so many occasions, we may repeat the saying that poetry is
+truer than history. Perhaps no actual maid ever spoke and acted so
+naturally as this imaginary one.
+
+If we think there is any paradox in these assertions, we should
+reflect that the standard of naturalness, individuality, and truth is in
+us. A real person seems to us to have character and consistency
+when his behaviour is such as to impress a definite and simple
+image upon our mind. In themselves, if we could count all their
+undiscovered springs of action, all men have character and
+consistency alike: all are equally fit to be types. But their
+characters are not equally intelligible to us, their behaviour is not
+equally deducible, and their motives not equally appreciable.
+Those who appeal most to us, either in themselves or by the
+emphasis they borrow from their similarity to other individuals, are
+those we remember and regard as the centres around which
+variations oscillate. These men are natural: all others are more or
+less eccentric.
+
+_Ideal characters._
+
+§ 46. The standard of naturalness being thus subjective, and
+determined by the laws of our imagination, we can understand why
+a spontaneous creation of the mind can be more striking and living
+than any reality, or any abstraction from realities. The artist can
+invent a form which, by its adaptation to the imagination, lodges
+there, and becomes a point of reference for all observations, and a
+standard of naturalness and beauty. A type may be introduced to
+the mind suddenly, by the chance presentation of a form that by its
+intrinsic impressiveness and imaginative coherence, acquires that
+pre-eminence which custom, or the mutual reinforcement of
+converging experiences, ordinarily gives to empirical percepts.
+
+This method of originating types is what we ordinarily describe as
+artistic creation. The name indicates the suddenness, originality,
+and individuality of the conception thus attained. What we call
+idealization is often a case of it. In idealization proper, however,
+what happens is the elimination of individual eccentricities; the
+result is abstract, and consequently meagre. This meagreness is
+often felt to be a greater disadvantage than the accidental and
+picturesque imperfection of real individuals, and the artist
+therefore turns to the brute fact, and studies and reproduces that
+with indiscriminate attention, rather than lose strength and
+individuality in the presentation of an insipid type. He seems
+forced to a choice between an abstract beauty and an unlovely
+example.
+
+But the great and masterful presentations of the ideal are somehow
+neither the one nor the other. They present ideal beauty with just
+that definiteness with which nature herself sometimes presents it.
+When we come in a crowd upon an incomparably beautiful face,
+we know it immediately as an embodiment of the ideal; while it
+contains the type, -- for if it did not we should find it monstrous
+and grotesque, -- it clothes that type in a peculiar splendour of
+form, colour, and expression. It has an individuality. And just so
+the imaginary figures of poetry and plastic art may have an
+individuality given them by the happy affinities of their elements
+in the imagination. They are not idealizations, they are
+spontaneous variations, which can arise in the mind quite as easily
+as in the world. They spring up in
+
+     The wreathèd trellis of a working brain;
+     . . . With all the gardener fancy e'er could feign
+     Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same.
+
+Imagination, in a word, generates as well as abstracts; it observes,
+combines, and cancels; but it also dreams. Spontaneous syntheses
+arise in it which are not mathematical averages of the images it
+receives from sense; they are effects of diffused excitements left in
+the brain by sensations. These excitements vary constantly in their
+various renewals, and occasionally take such a form that the soul is
+surprised by the inward vision of an unexampled beauty. If this
+inward vision is clear and steady, we have an aesthetic inspiration,
+a vocation to create; and if we can also command the technique of
+an appropriate art, we shall hasten to embody that inspiration, and
+realize an ideal. This ideal will be gradually recognized as
+supremely beautiful for the same reason that the object, had it been
+presented in the real world, would have been recognized as
+supremely beautiful; because while embodying a known type of
+form, -- being, that is, a proper man, animal, or vegetable, -- it
+possessed in an extraordinary degree those direct charms which
+most subjugate our attention.
+
+Imaginary forms then differ in dignity and beauty not according to
+their closeness to fact or type in nature, but according to the ease
+with which the normal imagination reproduces the synthesis they
+contain. To add wings to a man has always been a natural fancy;
+because man can easily imagine himself to fly, and the idea is
+delightful to him. The winged man is therefore a form generally
+recognized as beautiful; although it can happen, as it did to
+Michael Angelo, that our appreciation of the actual form of the
+human body should be too keen and overmastering to allow us to
+relish even so charming and imaginative an extravagance. The
+centaur is another beautiful monster. The imagination can easily
+follow the synthesis of the dream in which horse and man melted
+into one, and first gave the glorious suggestion of their united
+vitality.
+
+The same condition determines the worth of imaginary
+personalities. From the gods to the characters of comedy, all are, in
+proportion to their beauty, natural and exhilarating expressions of
+possible human activity. We sometimes remould visible forms into
+imaginary creatures; but our originality in this respect is meagre
+compared with the profusion of images of action which arise in us,
+both asleep and awake; we constantly dream of new situations,
+extravagant adventures, and exaggerated passions. Even our
+soberer thoughts are very much given to following the possible
+fortunes of some enterprise, and foretasting the satisfactions of
+love and ambition. The mind is therefore particularly sensitive to
+pictures of action and character; we are easily induced to follow
+the fortunes of any hero, and share his sentiments.
+
+Our will, as Descartes said in a different context, is infinite, while
+our intelligence is finite; we follow experience pretty closely in our
+ideas of things, and even the furniture of fairyland bears a sad
+resemblance to that of earth; but there is no limit to the elasticity of
+our passion; and we love to fancy ourselves kings and beggars,
+saints and villains, young and old, happy and unhappy. There
+seems to be a boundless capacity of development in each of us,
+which the circumstances of life determine to a narrow channel; and
+we like to revenge ourselves in our reveries for this imputed
+limitation, by classifying ourselves with all that we are not, but
+might so easily have been. We are full of sympathy for every
+manifestation of life, however unusual; and even the conception of
+infinite knowledge and happiness -- than which nothing could be
+more removed from our condition or more unrealizable to our
+fancy -- remains eternally interesting to us.
+
+The poet, therefore, who wishes to delineate a character need not
+keep a note-book. There is a quicker road to the heart -- if he has
+the gift to find it. Probably his readers will not themselves have
+kept note-books, and his elaborate observations will only be
+effective when he describes something which they also happen to
+have noticed. The typical characters describable by the empirical
+method are therefore few: the miser, the lover, the old nurse, the
+ingénue, and the other types of traditional comedy. Any greater
+specification would appeal only to a small audience for a short
+time, because the characteristics depicted would no longer exist to
+be recognized. But whatever experience a poet's hearers may have
+had, they are men. They will have certain imaginative capacities to
+conceive and admire those forms of character and action which,
+although never actually found, are felt by each man to express
+what he himself might and would have been, had circumstances
+been more favourable.
+
+The poet has only to study himself, and the art of expressing his
+own ideals, to find that he has expressed those of other people. He
+has but to enact in himself the part of each of his personages, and if
+he possesses that pliability and that definiteness of imagination
+which together make genius, he may express for his fellows those
+inward tendencies which in them have remained painfully dumb.
+He will be hailed as master of the human soul. He may know
+nothing of men, he may have almost no experience; but his
+creations will pass for models of naturalness, and for types of
+humanity. Their names will be in every one's mouth, and the lives
+of many generations will be enriched by the vision, one might
+almost say by the friendship, of these imaginary beings. They have
+individuality without having reality, because individuality is a
+thing acquired in the mind by the congeries of its impressions.
+They have power, also, because that depends on the appropriateness
+of a stimulus to touch the springs of reaction in the soul.
+And they of course have beauty, because in them is embodied
+the greatest of our imaginative delights, -- that of giving body to
+our latent capacities, and of wandering, without the strain and
+contradiction of actual existence, into all forms of possible being.
+
+_The religious imagination._
+
+§ 47. The greatest of these creations hare not been the work of any
+one man. They have been the slow product of the pious and poetic
+imagination. Starting from some personification of nature or some
+memory of a great man, the popular and priestly tradition has
+refined and developed the ideal; it has made it an expression of
+men's aspiration and a counterpart of their need. The devotion of
+each tribe, shrine, and psalmist has added some attribute to the god
+or some parable to his legend; and thus, around the kernel of some
+original divine function, the imagination of a people has gathered
+every possible expression of it, creating a complete and beautiful
+personality, with its history, its character, and its gifts. No poet has
+ever equalled the perfection or significance of these religious
+creations. The greatest characters of fiction are uninteresting and
+unreal compared with the conceptions of the gods; so much so that
+men have believed that their gods have objective reality.
+
+The forms men see in dreams might have been a reason for
+believing in vague and disquieting ghosts; but the belief in
+individual and well-defined divinities, with which the visions of
+the dreams might be identified, is obviously due to the intrinsic
+coherence and impressiveness of the conception of those deities.
+The visions would never have suggested the legend and attributes
+of the god; but when the figure of the god was once imaginatively
+conceived, and his name and aspect fixed in the imagination, it
+would be easy to recognize him in any hallucination, or to interpret
+any event as due to his power. These manifestations, which
+constitute the evidence of his actual existence, can be regarded as
+manifestations of him, rather than of a vague, unknown power,
+only when the imagination already possesses a vivid picture of him,
+and of his appropriate functions. This picture is the work of a
+spontaneous fancy.
+
+No doubt, when the belief is once specified, and the special and
+intelligible god is distinguished in the night and horror of the
+all-pervading natural power, the belief in his reality helps to
+concentrate our attention on his nature, and thus to develope and
+enrich our idea. The belief in the reality of an ideal personality
+brings about its further idealization. Had it ever occurred to any
+Greek seer to attribute events to the influence of Achilles, or to
+offer sacrifices to him in the heat of the enthusiasm kindled by the
+thought of his beauty and virtue, the legend of Achilles, now
+become a god, would have grown and deepened; it would have
+been moralized like the legend of Hercules, or naturalized like that
+of Persephone, and what is now but a poetic character of
+extraordinary force and sublimity would have become the adored
+patron of generation after generation, and a manifestation of the
+divine man.
+
+Achilles would then have been as significant and unforgettable a
+figure as Apollo or his sister, as Zeus, Athena, and the other
+greater gods. If ever, while that phase of religion lasted, his
+character had been obscured and his features dimmed, he would
+have been recreated by every new votary: poets would never have
+tired of singing his praises, or sculptors of rendering his form.
+When, after the hero had been the centre and subject of so much
+imaginative labour, the belief in his reality lapsed, to be transferred
+to some other conception of cosmic power, he would have
+remained an ideal of poetry and art, and a formative influence of
+all cultivated minds. This he is still, like all the great creations of
+avowed fiction, but he would have been immensely more so, had
+belief in his reality kept the creative imagination continuously
+intent upon his nature.
+
+The reader can hardly fail to see that all this applies with equal
+force to the Christian conception of the sacred personalities. Christ,
+the Virgin Mary, and the saints may have been exactly what our
+imagination pictures them to be; that is entirely possible; nor can I
+see that it is impossible that the conceptions of other religions
+might themselves have actual counterparts somewhere in the
+universe. That is a question of faith and empirical evidence with
+which we are not here concerned. But however descriptive of truth
+our conceptions may be, they have evidently grown up in our
+minds by an inward process of development. The materials of
+history and tradition have been melted and recast by the devout
+imagination into those figures in the presence of which our piety
+lives.
+
+That is the reason why the reconstructed logical gods of the
+metaphysicians are always an offence and a mockery to the
+religious consciousness. There is here, too, a bare possibility that
+some one of these absolutes may be a representation of the truth;
+but the method by which this representation is acquired is violent
+and artificial; while the traditional conception of God is the
+spontaneous embodiment of passionate contemplation and long
+experience.
+
+As the God of religion differs from that of metaphysics, so does
+the Christ of tradition differ from that of our critical historians.
+Even if we took the literal narrative of the Gospels and accepted it
+as all we could know of Christ, without allowing ourselves any
+imaginative interpretation of the central figure, we should get an
+ideal of him, I will not say very different from that of St. Francis or
+St. Theresa, but even from that of the English, prayer-book. The
+Christ men have loved and adored is an ideal of their own hearts,
+the construction of an ever-present personality, living and
+intimately understood, out of the fragments of story and doctrine
+connected with a name. This subjective image has inspired all the
+prayers, all the conversions, all the penances, charities, and
+sacrifices, as well as half the art of the Christian world.
+
+The Virgin Mary, whose legend is so meagre, but whose power
+over the Catholic imagination is so great, is an even clearer
+illustration of this inward building up of an ideal form. Everything
+is here spontaneous sympathetic expansion of two given events:
+the incarnation and the crucifixion. The figure of the Virgin, found
+in these mighty scenes, is gradually clarified and developed, until
+we come to the thought on the one hand of her freedom from
+original sin, and on the other to that of her universal maternity. We
+thus attain the conception of one of the noblest of conceivable
+rôles and of one of the most beautiful of characters. It is a pity that
+a foolish iconoclasm should so long have deprived the Protestant
+mind of the contemplation of this ideal.
+
+Perhaps it is a sign of the average imaginative dulness or fatigue of
+certain races and epochs that they so readily abandon these
+supreme creations. For, if we are hopeful, why should we not
+believe that the best we can fancy is also the truest; and if we are
+distrustful in general of our prophetic gifts, why should we cling
+only to the most mean and formless of our illusions? From the
+beginning to the end of our perceptive and imaginative activity, we
+are synthesizing the material of experience into unities the
+independent reality of which is beyond proof, nay, beyond the
+possibility of a shadow of evidence. And yet the life of intelligence,
+like the joy of contemplation, lies entirely in the formation and
+inter-relation of these unities. This activity yields us all the objects
+with which we can deal, and endows them with the finer and more
+intimate part of their beauty. The most perfect of these forms,
+judged by its affinity to our powers and its stability in the presence
+of our experience, is the one with which we should be content; no
+other kind of veracity could add to its value.
+
+The greatest feats of synthesis which the human mind has yet
+accomplished will, indeed, be probably surpassed and all ideals yet
+formed be superseded, because they were not based upon enough
+experience, or did not fit that experience with adequate precision.
+It is also possible that changes in the character of the facts, or in
+the powers of intelligence, should necessitate a continual
+reconstruction of our world. But unless human nature suffers an
+inconceivable change, the chief intellectual and aesthetic value of
+our ideas will always come from the creative action of the
+imagination.
+
+
+PART IV
+
+EXPRESSION
+
+_Expression defined._
+
+§ 48. We have found in the beauty of material and form the
+objectification of certain pleasures connected with the process of
+direct perception, with the formation, in the one case of a sensation,
+or quality, in the other of a synthesis of sensations or qualities. But
+the human consciousness is not a perfectly clear mirror, with
+distinct boundaries and clear-cut images, determinate in number
+and exhaustively perceived. Our ideas half emerge for a moment
+from the dim continuum of vital feeling and diffused sense, and are
+hardly fixed before they are changed and transformed, by the
+shifting of attention and the perception of new relations, into ideas
+of really different objects. This fluidity of the mind would make
+reflection impossible, did we not fix in words and other symbols
+certain abstract contents; we thus become capable of recognizing
+in one perception the repetition of another, and of recognizing in
+certain recurrences of impressions a persistent object. This
+discrimination and classification of the contents of consciousness
+is the work of perception and understanding, and the pleasures that
+accompany these activities make the beauty of the sensible world.
+
+But our hold upon our thoughts extends even further. We not only
+construct visible unities and recognizable types, but remain aware
+of their affinities to what is not at the time perceived; that is, we
+find in them a certain tendency and quality, not original to them, a
+meaning and a tone, which upon investigation we shall see to have
+been the proper characteristics of other objects and feelings,
+associated with them once in our experience. The hushed
+reverberations of these associated feelings continue in the brain,
+and by modifying our present reaction, colour the image upon
+which our attention is fixed. The quality thus acquired by objects
+through association is what we call their expression. Whereas in
+form or material there is one object with its emotional effect, in
+expression there are two, and the emotional effect belongs to the
+character of the second or suggested one. Expression may thus
+make beautiful by suggestion things in themselves indifferent, or it
+may come to heighten the beauty which they already possess.
+
+Expression is not always distinguishable in consciousness
+from the value of material or form, because we do not always
+have a distinguishable memory of the related idea which the
+expressiveness implies. When we have such a memory, as at
+the sight of some once frequented garden, we clearly and
+spontaneously attribute our emotion to the memory and not to the
+present fact which it beautifies. The revival of a pleasure and its
+embodiment in a present object which in itself might have been
+indifferent, is here patent and acknowledged.
+
+The distinctness of the analysis may indeed be so great as to
+prevent the synthesis; we may so entirely pass to the suggested
+object, that our pleasure will be embodied in the memory of that,
+while the suggestive sensation will be overlooked, and the
+expressiveness of the present object will fail to make it beautiful.
+Thus the mementos of a lost friend do not become beautiful by
+virtue of the sentimental associations which may make them
+precious. The value is confined to the images of the memory; they
+are too clear to let any of that value escape and diffuse itself over
+the rest of our consciousness, and beautify the objects which we
+actually behold. We say explicitly: I value this trifle for its
+associations. And so long as this division continues, the worth of
+the thing is not for us aesthetic.
+
+But a little dimming of our memory will often make it so. Let the
+images of the past fade, let them remain simply as a halo and
+suggestion of happiness hanging about a scene; then this scene,
+however empty and uninteresting in itself, will have a deep and
+intimate charm; we shall be pleased by its very vulgarity. We shall
+not confess so readily that we value the place for its associations;
+we shall rather say: I am fond of this landscape; it has for me an
+ineffable attraction. The treasures of the memory have been melted
+and dissolved, and are now gilding the object that supplants them;
+they are giving this object expression.
+
+Expression then differs from material or formal value only as habit
+differs from instinct -- in its origin. Physiologically, they are both
+pleasurable radiations of a given stimulus; mentally, they are both
+values incorporated in an object. But an observer, looking at the
+mind historically, sees in the one case the survival of an experience,
+in the other the reaction of an innate disposition. This experience,
+moreover, is generally rememberable, and then the extrinsic source
+of the charm which expression gives becomes evident even to the
+consciousness in which it arises. A word, for instance, is often
+beautiful simply by virtue of its meaning and associations; but
+sometimes this expressive beauty is added to a musical quality in
+the world itself.  In all expression we may thus distinguish two
+terms: the first is the object actually presented, the word, the image,
+the expressive thing; the second is the object suggested, the further
+thought, emotion, or image evoked, the thing expressed.
+
+These lie together in the mind, and their union constitutes
+expression. If the value lies wholly in the first term, we have no
+beauty of expression. The decorative inscriptions in Saracenic
+monuments can have no beauty of expression for one who does not
+read Arabic; their charm is wholly one of material and form. Or if
+they have any expression, it is by virtue of such thoughts as they
+might suggest, as, for instance, of the piety and oriental
+sententiousness of the builders and of the aloofness from us of all
+their world. And even these suggestions, being a wandering of our
+fancy rather than a study of the object, would fail to arouse a
+pleasure which would be incorporated in the present image. The
+scroll would remain without expression, although its presence
+might have suggested to us interesting visions of other things. The
+two terms would be too independent, and the intrinsic values of
+each would remain distinct from that of the other. There would be
+no visible expressiveness, although there might have been
+discursive suggestions.
+
+Indeed, if expression were constituted by the external relation of
+object with object, everything would be expressive equally,
+indeterminately, and universally. The flower in the crannied wall
+would express the same thing as the bust of Caesar or the _Critique
+of Pure Reason._ What constitutes the individual expressiveness of
+these things is the circle of thoughts allied to each in a given mind;
+my words, for instance, express the thoughts which they actually
+arouse in the reader; they may express more to one man than to
+another, and to me they may have expressed more or less than to
+yon. My thoughts remain unexpressed, if my words do not arouse
+them in you, and very likely your greater wisdom will find in what
+I say the manifestation of a thousand principles of which I never
+dreamed. Expression depends upon the union of two terms, one of
+which must be furnished by the imagination; and a mind cannot
+furnish what it does not possess. The expressiveness of everything
+accordingly increases with the intelligence of the observer.
+
+But for expression to be an element of beauty, it must, of course,
+fulfil another condition. I may see the relations of an object, I may
+understand it perfectly, and may nevertheless regard it with entire
+indifference. If the pleasure fails, the very substance and
+protoplasm of beauty is wanting. Nor, as we have seen, is even the
+pleasure enough; for I may receive a letter full of the most joyous
+news, but neither the paper, nor the writing, nor the style, need
+seem beautiful to me. Not until I confound the impressions, and
+suffuse the symbols themselves with the emotions they arouse, and
+find joy and sweetness in the very words I hear, will the
+expressiveness constitute a beauty; as when they sing, _Gloria in
+excelsis Deo_.
+
+The value of the second term must be incorporated in the first; for
+the beauty of expression is as inherent in the object as that of
+material or form, only it accrues to that object not from the bare act
+of perception, but from the association with it of further processes,
+due to the existence of former impressions. We may conveniently
+use the word "expressiveness" to mean all the capacity of
+suggestion possessed by a thing, and the word "expression" for the
+aesthetic modification which that expressiveness may cause in it.
+Expressiveness is thus the power given by experience to any image
+to call up others in the mind; and this expressiveness becomes an
+aesthetic value, that is, becomes expression, when the value
+involved in the associations thus awakened are incorporated in the
+present object.
+
+_The associative process._
+
+§ 49. The purest case in which, an expressive value could arise
+might seem to be that in which both terms were indifferent in
+themselves, and what pleased was the activity of relating them. We
+have such a phenomenon in mathematics, and in any riddle, puzzle,
+or play with symbols. But such pleasures fall without the aesthetic
+field in the absence of any objectification; they are pleasures of
+exercise, and the objects involved are not regarded as the
+substances in which those values inhere. We think of more or less
+interesting problems or calculations, but it never occurs to the
+mathematician to establish a hierarchy of forms according to their
+beauty. Only by a metaphor could he say that (a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab +
+b2 was a more beautiful formula than 2 + 2 = 4. Yet in proportion
+as such conceptions become definite and objective in the mind,
+they approach aesthetic values, and the use of aesthetic epithets in
+describing them becomes more constant and literal.
+
+The beauties of abstract music are but one step beyond such
+mathematical relations -- they are those relations presented in a
+sensible form, and constituting an imaginable object. But, as we
+see clearly in this last case, when the relation and not the terms
+constitute the object, we have, if there is beauty at all, a beauty of
+form, not of expression; for the more mathematical the charm of
+music is the more form and the less expression do we see in it. In
+fact, the sense of relation is here the essence of the object itself,
+and the activity of passing from term to term, far from taking us
+beyond our presentation to something extrinsic, constitutes that
+presentation. The pleasure of this relational activity is therefore the
+pleasure of conceiving a determined form, and nothing could be
+more thoroughly a formal beauty.
+
+And we may here insist upon a point of fundamental importance;
+namely, that the process of association enters consciousness as
+directly, and produces as simple a sensation, as any process in any
+organ. The pleasures and pains of cerebration, the delight and the
+fatigue of it, are felt exactly like bodily impressions; they have the
+same directness, although not the same localization. Their seat is
+not open to our daily observation, and therefore we leave them
+disembodied, and fancy they are peculiarly spiritual and intimate to
+the soul. Or we try to think that they flow by some logical
+necessity from the essences of objects simultaneously in our mind.
+We involve ourselves in endless perplexities in trying to deduce
+excellence and beauty, unity and necessity, from the describable
+qualities of things; we repeat the rationalistic fiction of turning the
+notions which we abstract from the observation of facts into the
+powers that give those facts character and being.
+
+We have, for instance, in the presence of two images a sense of
+their incongruity; and we say that the character of the images
+causes this emotion; whereas in dreams we constantly have the
+most rapid transformations and patent contradictions without any
+sense of incongruity at all; because the brain is dozing and the
+necessary shock and mental inhibition is avoided. Add this
+stimulation, and the incongruity returns. Had such a shock never
+been felt, we should not know what incongruity meant; no more
+than without eyes we should know the meaning of blue or yellow.
+
+In saying this, we are not really leaning upon physiological theory.
+The appeal to our knowledge of the brain facilitates the conception
+of the immediacy of our feelings of relation; but that immediacy
+would be apparent to a sharp introspection. We do not need to
+think of the eye or skin to feel that light and heat are ultimate data;
+no more do we need to think of cerebral excitements to see that
+right and left, before and after, good and bad, one and two, like and
+unlike, are irreducible feelings. The categories are senses without
+organs, or with organs unknown. Just as the discrimination of our
+feelings of colour and sound might never have been distinct and
+constant, had we not come upon the organs that seem to convey
+and control them; so perhaps our classification of our inner
+sensations will never be settled until their respective organs are
+discovered; for psychology has always been physiological, without
+knowing it. But this truth remains -- quite apart from physical
+conceptions, not to speak of metaphysical materialism -- that
+whatever the historical conditions of any state of mind may be said
+to be, it exists, when it does exist, immediately and absolutely;
+each of its distinguishable parts might conceivably have been
+absent from it; and its character, as well as its existence, is a mere
+datum of sense.
+
+The pleasure that belongs to the consciousness of relations is
+therefore as immediate as any other; indeed, our emotional
+consciousness is always single, but we treat it as a resultant of
+many and even of conflicting feelings because we look at it
+historically with a view to comprehending it, and distribute it into
+as many factors as we find objects or causes to which to attribute it.
+The pleasure of association is an immediate feeling, which we
+account for by its relation to a feeling in the past, or to cerebral
+structure modified by a former experience; just as memory itself,
+which we explain by a reference to the past, is a peculiar
+complication of present consciousness.
+
+_Kinds of value in the second term._
+
+§ 50. These reflections may make less surprising to us what is the
+most striking fact about the philosophy of expression; namely, that
+the value acquired by the expressive thing is often of an entirely
+different kind from that which the thing expressed possesses. The
+expression of physical pleasure, of passion, or even of pain, may
+constitute beauty and please the beholder. Thus the value of the
+second term may be physical, or practical, or even negative; and it
+may be transmuted, as it passes to the first term, into a value at
+once positive and aesthetic. The transformation of practical values
+into aesthetic has often been noted, and has even led to the theory
+that beauty is utility seen at arm's length; a premonition of pleasure
+and prosperity, much as smell is a premonition of taste. The
+transformation of negative values into positive has naturally
+attracted even more attention, and given rise to various theories of
+the comic, tragic, and sublime. For these three species of aesthetic
+good seem to please us by the suggestion of evil; and the problem
+arises how a mind can be made happier by having suggestions of
+unhappiness stirred within it; an unhappiness it cannot understand
+without in some degree sharing in it. We must now turn to the
+analysis of this question.
+
+The expressiveness of a smile is not discovered exactly through
+association of images. The child smiles (without knowing it) when
+he feels pleasure; and the nurse smiles back; his own pleasure is
+associated with her conduct, and her smile is therefore expressive
+of pleasure. The fact of his pleasure at her smile is the ground of
+his instinctive belief in her pleasure in it. For this reason the
+circumstances expressive of happiness are not those that are
+favourable to it in reality, but those that are congruous with it in
+idea. The green of spring, the bloom of youth, the variability of
+childhood, the splendour of wealth and beauty, all these are
+symbols of happiness, not because they have been known to
+accompany it in fact, -- for they do not, any more than their
+opposites, -- but because they produce an image and echo of it in
+us aesthetically. We believe those things to be happy which it
+makes us happy to think of or to see; the belief in the blessedness
+of the supreme being itself has no other foundation. Our joy in the
+thought of omniscience makes us attribute joy to the possession of
+it, which it would in fact perhaps be very far from involving or
+even allowing.
+
+The expressiveness of forms has a value as a sign of the life that
+actually inhabits those forms only when they resemble our own
+body; it is then probable that similar conditions of body involve, in
+them and in us, similar emotions; and we should not long continue
+to regard as the expression of pleasure an attitude that we know, by
+experience in our own person, to accompany pain. Children,
+indeed, may innocently torture animals, not having enough sense
+of analogy to be stopped by the painful suggestions of their
+writhings; and, although in a rough way we soon correct these
+crying misinterpretations by a better classification of experience,
+we nevertheless remain essentially subject to the same error. We
+cannot escape it, because the method which involves it is the only
+one that justifies belief in objective consciousness at all. Analogy
+of bodies helps us to distribute and classify the life we conceive
+about us; but what leads us to conceive it is the direct association
+of our own feeling with images of things, an association which
+precedes any clear representation of our own gestures and attitude.
+I know that smiles mean pleasure before I have caught myself
+smiling in the glass; they mean pleasure because they give it.
+
+Since these aesthetic effects include some of the most moving and
+profound beauties, philosophers have not been slow to turn the
+unanalyzed paradox of their formation into a principle, and to
+explain by it the presence and necessity of evil. As in the tragic and
+the sublime, they have thought, the sufferings and dangers to
+which a hero is exposed seem to add to his virtue and dignity, and
+to our sacred joy in the contemplation of him, so the sundry evils
+of life may be elements in the transcendent glory of the whole.
+And once fired by this thought, those who pretend to justify the
+ways of God to man have, naturally, not stopped to consider
+whether so edifying a phenomenon was not a hasty illusion. They
+have, indeed, detested any attempt to explain it rationally, as
+tending to obscure one of the moral laws of the universe. In
+venturing, therefore, to repeat such an attempt, we should not be
+too sanguine of success; for we have to encounter not only the
+intrinsic difficulties of the problem, but also a wide-spread and
+arrogant metaphysical prejudice.
+
+For the sake of greater clearness we may begin by classifying the
+values that can enter into expression; we shall then be better able to
+judge by what combinations of them various well-known effects
+and emotions are produced. The intrinsic value of the first term can
+be entirely neglected, since it does not contribute to expression. It
+does, however, contribute greatly to the beauty of the expressive
+object. The first term is the source of stimulation, and the
+acuteness and pleasantness of this determine to a great extent the
+character and sweep of the associations that will be aroused. Very
+often the pleasantness of the medium will counterbalance the
+disagreeableness of the import, and expressions, in themselves
+hideous or inappropriate, may be excused for the sake of the object
+that conveys them. A beautiful voice will redeem a vulgar song, a
+beautiful colour and texture an unmeaning composition. Beauty in
+the first term -- beauty of sound, rhythm, and image -- will make
+any thought whatever poetic, while no thought whatever can be so
+without that immediate beauty of presentation.[14]
+
+_Aesthetic value in the second term._
+
+§ 51. That the noble associations of any object should embellish
+that object is very comprehensible. Homer furnishes us with a
+good illustration of the constant employment of this effect. The
+first term, one need hardly say, leaves with him little to be desired.
+The verse is beautiful. Sounds, images, and composition conspire
+to stimulate and delight. This immediate beauty is sometimes used
+to clothe things terrible and sad; there is no dearth of the tragic in
+Homer. But the tendency of his poetry is nevertheless to fill the
+outskirts of our consciousness with the trooping images of things
+no less fair and noble than the verse itself. The heroes are virtuous.
+There is none of importance who is not admirable in his way. The
+palaces, the arms, the horses, the sacrifices, are always excellent.
+The women are always stately and beautiful. The ancestry and the
+history of every one are honourable and good. The whole Homeric
+world is clean, clear, beautiful, and providential, and no small part
+of the perennial charm of the poet is that he thus immerses us in an
+atmosphere of beauty; a beauty not concentrated and reserved for
+some extraordinary sentiment, action, or person, but permeating
+the whole and colouring the common world of soldiers and sailors,
+war and craft, with a marvellous freshness and inward glow. There
+is nothing in the associations of life in this world or in another to
+contradict or disturb our delight. All is beautiful, and beautiful
+through and through.
+
+Something of this quality meets us in all simple and idyllic
+compositions. There is, for instance, a popular demand that stories
+and comedies should "end well." The hero and heroine must be
+young and handsome; unless they die, -- which is another matter, --
+they must not in the end be poor. The landscape in the play must
+be beautiful; the dresses pretty; the plot without serious mishap. A
+pervasive presentation of pleasure must give warmth and ideality
+to the whole. In the proprieties of social life we find the same
+principle; we study to make our surroundings, manner, and
+conversation suggest nothing but what is pleasing. We hide the
+ugly and disagreeable portion of our lives, and do not allow the
+least hint of it to come to light upon festive and public occasions.
+Whenever, in a word, a thoroughly pleasing effect is found, it is
+found by the expression, as well as presentation, of what is in itself
+pleasing -- and when this effect is to be produced artificially, we
+attain it by the suppression of all expression that is not suggestive
+of something good.
+
+If our consciousness were exclusively aesthetic, this kind of
+expression would be the only one allowed in art or prized in nature.
+We should avoid as a shock or an insipidity, the suggestion of
+anything not intrinsically beautiful. As there would be no values
+not aesthetic, our pleasure could never be heightened by any other
+kind of interest. But as contemplation is actually a luxury in our
+lives, and things interest us chiefly on passionate and practical
+grounds, the accumulation of values too exclusively aesthetic
+produces in our minds an effect of closeness and artificiality. So
+selective a diet cloys, and our palate, accustomed to much daily
+vinegar and salt, is surfeited by such unmixed sweet.
+
+Instead we prefer to see through the medium of art -- through the
+beautiful first term of our expression -- the miscellaneous world
+which is so well known to us -- perhaps so dear, and at any rate so
+inevitable, an object. We are more thankful for this presentation, of
+the unlovely truth in a lovely form, than for the like presentation of
+an abstract beauty; what is lost in the purity of the pleasure is
+gained in the stimulation of our attention, and in the relief of
+viewing with aesthetic detachment the same things that in practical
+life hold tyrannous dominion over our souls. The beauty that is
+associated only with other beauty is therefore a sort of aesthetic
+dainty; it leads the fancy through a fairyland of lovely forms,
+where we must forget the common objects of our interest. The
+charm of such an idealization is undeniable; but the other
+important elements of our memory and will cannot long be
+banished. Thoughts of labour, ambition, lust, anger, confusion,
+sorrow, and death must needs mix with our contemplation and lend
+their various expressions to the objects with which in experience
+they are so closely allied. Hence the incorporation in the beautiful
+of values of other sorts, and the comparative rareness in nature or
+art of expressions the second term of which has only aesthetic
+value.
+
+_Practical value in the same._
+
+§ 52. More important and frequent is the case of the expression of
+utility. This is found whenever the second term is the idea of
+something of practical advantage to us, the premonition of which
+brings satisfaction; and this satisfaction prompts an approval of the
+presented object. The tone of our consciousness is raised by the
+foretaste of a success; and this heightened pleasure is objectified in
+the present image, since the associated image to which the
+satisfaction properly belongs often fails to become distinct. We do
+not conceive clearly what this practical advantage will be; but the
+vague sense that an advantage is there, that something desirable
+has been done, accompanies the presentation, and gives it
+expression.
+
+The case that most resembles that of which we have been just
+speaking, is perhaps that in which the second term is a piece of
+interesting information, a theory, or other intellectual datum. Our
+interest in facts and theories, when not aesthetic, is of course
+practical; it consists in their connexion with our interests, and in
+the service they can render us in the execution of our designs.
+Intellectual values are utilitarian in their origin but aesthetic in
+their form, since the advantage of knowledge is often lost sight of,
+and ideas are prized for their own sake. Curiosity can become a
+disinterested passion, and yield intimate and immediate satisfaction
+like any other impulse.
+
+When we have before us, for instance, a fine map, in which the line
+of coast, now rocky, now sandy, is clearly indicated, together with
+the windings of the rivers, the elevations of the land, and the
+distribution of the population, we have the simultaneous
+suggestion of so many facts, the sense of mastery over so much
+reality, that we gaze at it with delight, and need no practical motive
+to keep us studying it, perhaps for hours together. A map is not
+naturally thought of as an aesthetic object; it is too exclusively
+expressive. The first term is passed over as a mere symbol, and the
+mind is filled either with imaginations of the landscape the country
+would really offer, or with thoughts about its history and
+inhabitants. These circumstances prevent the ready objectification
+of our pleasure in the map itself. And yet, let the tints of it be a
+little subtle, let the lines be a little delicate, and the masses of land
+and sea somewhat balanced, and we really have a beautiful thing; a
+thing the charm of which consists almost entirely in its meaning,
+but which nevertheless pleases us in the same way as a picture or a
+graphic symbol might please. Give the symbol a little intrinsic
+worth of form, line, and colour, and it attracts like a magnet all the
+values of the things it is known to symbolize. It becomes beautiful
+in its expressiveness.
+
+Hardly different from this example is that of travel or of reading;
+for in these employments we get many aesthetic pleasures, the
+origin of which is in the satisfaction of curiosity and intelligence.
+When we say admiringly of anything that it is characteristic, that it
+embodies a whole period or a whole man, we are absorbed by the
+pleasant sense that it offers innumerable avenues of approach to
+interesting and important things. The less we are able to specify
+what these are, the more beautiful will the object be that expresses
+them. For if we could specify them, the felt value would
+disintegrate, and distribute itself among the ideas of the suggested
+things, leaving the expressive object bare of all interest, like the
+letters of a printed page.
+
+The courtiers of Philip the Second probably did not regard his
+rooms at the Escurial as particularly interesting, but simply as
+small, ugly, and damp. The character which we find in them and
+which makes us regard them as eminently expressive of whatever
+was sinister in the man, probably did not strike them. They knew
+the king, and had before them words, gestures, and acts enough in
+which to read his character. But all these living facts are wanting to
+our experience; and it is the suggestion of them in their
+unrealizable vagueness that fills the apartments of the monarch
+with such pungent expression. It is not otherwise with all emphatic
+expressiveness -- moonlight and castle moats, minarets and
+cypresses, camels filing through the desert -- such images get their
+character from the strong but misty atmosphere of sentiment and
+adventure which clings about them. The profit of travel, and the
+extraordinary charm of all visible relics of antiquity, consists in the
+acquisition of images in which to focus a mass of discursive
+knowledge, not otherwise felt together. Such images are concrete
+symbols of much latent experience, and the deep roots of
+association give them the same hold upon our attention which
+might be secured by a fortunate form or splendid material.
+
+_Cost as an element of effect._
+
+§ 53. There is one consideration which often adds much to the
+interest with which we view an object, but which we might be
+virtuously inclined not to admit among aesthetic values. I mean
+cost. Cost is practical value expressed in abstract terms, and from
+the price of anything we can often infer what relation it has to the
+desires and efforts of mankind. There is no reason why cost, or the
+circumstances which are its basis, should not, like other practical
+values, heighten the tone of consciousness, and add to the pleasure
+with which we view an object. In fact, such is our daily experience;
+for great as is the sensuous beauty of gems, their rarity and price
+adds an expression of distinction to them, which they would never
+have if they were cheap.
+
+The circumstance that makes the appreciation of cost often
+unaesthetic is the abstractness of that quality. The price of an
+object is an algebraic symbol, it is a conventional term, invented to
+facilitate our operations, which remains arid and unmeaning if we
+stop with it and forget to translate it again at the end into its
+concrete equivalent. The commercial mind dwells in that
+intermediate limbo of symbolized values; the calculator's senses
+are muffled by his intellect and by his habit of abbreviated thinking.
+His mental process is a reckoning that loses sight of its original
+values, and is over without reaching any concrete image. Therefore
+the knowledge of cost, when expressed in terms of money, is
+incapable of contributing to aesthetic effect, but the reason is not
+so much that the suggested value is not aesthetic, as that no real
+value is suggested at all. No object of any kind is presented to the
+mind by the numerical expression. If we reinterpret our price,
+however, and translate it back into the facts which constitute it,
+into the materials employed, their original place and quality, and
+the labour and art which transformed them into the present thing,
+then we add to the aesthetic value of the object, by the expression
+which we find in it, not of its price in money, but of its human cost.
+We have now the consciousness of the real values which it
+represents, and these values, sympathetically present to the fancy,
+increase our present interest and admiration.
+
+I believe economists count among the elements of the value of an
+object the rarity of its material, the labour of its manufacture, and
+the distance from which it is brought. Now all these qualities, if
+attended to in themselves, appeal greatly to the imagination. We
+have a natural interest in what is rare and affects us with unusual
+sensations. What comes from a far country carries our thoughts
+there, and gains by the wealth and picturesqueness of its
+associations. And that on which human labour has been spent,
+especially if it was a labour of love, and is apparent in the product,
+has one of the deepest possible claims to admiration. So that the
+standard of cost, the most vulgar of all standards, is such only
+when it remains empty and abstract. Let the thoughts wander back
+and consider the elements of value, and our appreciation, from
+being verbal and commercial, becomes poetic and real.
+
+We have in this one more example of the manner in which
+practical values, when suggested by and incorporated in any object,
+contribute to its beauty. Our sense of what lies behind, unlovely
+though that background may be, gives interest and poignancy to
+that which is present; our attention and wonder are engaged, and a
+new meaning and importance is added to such intrinsic beauty as
+the presentation may possess.
+
+_The expression of economy and fitness._
+
+§ 54. The same principle explains the effect of evident cleanliness,
+security, economy, and comfort. This Dutch charm hardly needs
+explanation; we are conscious of the domesticity and neatness
+which pleases us in it. There are few things more utterly
+discomforting to our minds than waste: it is a sort of pungent
+extract and quintessence of folly. The visible manifestation of it is
+therefore very offensive; and that of its absence very reassuring.
+The force of our approval of practical fitness and economy in
+things rises into an appreciation that is half-aesthetic, and which
+becomes wholly so when the fit form becomes fixed in a type, to
+the lines of which we are accustomed; so that the practical
+necessity of the form is heightened and concentrated into the
+aesthetic propriety of it.
+
+The much-praised expression of function and truth in architectural
+works reduces itself to this principle. The useful contrivance at
+first appeals to our practical approval; while we admire its
+ingenuity, we cannot fail to become gradually accustomed to its
+presence, and to register with attentive pleasure the relation of its
+parts. Utility, as we have pointed out in its place, is thus the
+guiding principle in the determination of forms.
+
+The recurring observation of the utility, economy, and fitness of
+the traditional arrangement in buildings or other products of art,
+re-enforces this formal expectation with a reflective approval. We are
+accustomed, for instance, to sloping roofs; the fact that they were
+necessary has made them familiar, and the fact that they are
+familiar has made them objects of study and of artistic enjoyment.
+If at any moment, however, the notion of condemning them passes
+through the mind, -- if we have visions of the balustrade against
+the sky, -- we revert to our homely image with kindly loyalty,
+when we remember the long months of rain and snow, and the
+comfortless leaks to be avoided. The thought of a glaring, practical
+unfitness is enough to spoil our pleasure in any form, however
+beautiful intrinsically, while the sense of practical fitness is enough
+to reconcile us to the most awkward and rude contrivances.
+
+This principle is, indeed, not a fundamental, but an auxiliary one;
+the expression of utility modifies effect, but does not constitute it.
+There would be a kind of superstitious haste in the notion that what
+is convenient and economical is necessarily and by miracle
+beautiful. The uses and habits of one place and society require
+works which are or may easily become intrinsically beautiful; the
+uses and habits of another make these beautiful works impossible.
+The beauty has a material and formal basis that we have already
+studied; no fitness of design will make a building of ten equal
+storeys as beautiful as a pavilion or a finely proportioned tower; no
+utility will make a steamboat as beautiful as a sailing vessel. But
+the forms once established, with their various intrinsic characters,
+the fitness we know to exist in them will lend them some added
+charm, or their unfitness will disquiet us, and haunt us like a
+conscientious qualm. The other interests of our lives here mingle
+with the purely aesthetic, to enrich or to embitter it.
+
+If Sybaris is so sad a name to the memory -- and who is without
+some Sybaris of his own? -- if the image of it is so tormenting and
+in the end so disgusting, this is not because we no longer think its
+marbles bright, its fountains cool, its athletes strong, or its roses
+fragrant; but because, mingled with all these supreme beauties,
+there is the ubiquitous shade of Nemesis, the sense of a vacant will
+and a suicidal inhumanity. The intolerableness of this moral
+condition poisons the beauty which continues to be felt. If this
+beauty did not exist, and was not still desired, the tragedy would
+disappear and Jehovah would be deprived of the worth of his
+victim. The sternness of moral forces lies precisely in this, that the
+sacrifices morality imposes upon us are real, that the things it
+renders impossible are still precious.
+
+We are accustomed to think of prudence as estranging us only
+from low and ignoble things; we forget that utility and the need of
+system in our lives is a bar also to the free flights of the spirit. The
+highest instincts tend to disorganization as much as the lowest,
+since order and benefit is what practical morality everywhere
+insists upon, while sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
+The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man
+only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the
+understanding. For this reason, utility keeps close watch over
+beauty, lest in her wilfulness and riot she should offend against our
+practical needs and ultimate happiness. And when the conscience
+is keen, this vigilance of the practical imagination over the
+speculative ceases to appear as an eventual and external check. The
+least suspicion of luxury, waste, impurity, or cruelty is then a
+signal for alarm and insurrection. That which emits this _sapor
+hoereticus_ becomes so initially horrible, that naturally no beauty
+can ever be discovered in it; the senses and imagination are in that
+case inhibited by the conscience.
+
+For this reason, the doctrine that beauty is essentially nothing but
+the expression of moral or practical good appeals to persons of
+predominant moral sensitiveness, not only because they wish it
+were the truth, but because it largely describes the experience of
+their own minds, somewhat warped in this particular. It will further
+be observed that the moralists are much more able to condemn
+than to appreciate the effects of the arts. Their taste is delicate
+without being keen, for the principle on which they judge is one
+which really operates to control and extend aesthetic effects; it is a
+source of expression and of certain _nuances_ of satisfaction; but it
+is foreign to the stronger and more primitive aesthetic values to
+which the same persons are comparatively blind.
+
+_The authority of morals over aesthetics._
+
+§ 55. The extent to which aesthetic goods should be sacrificed is,
+of course, a moral question; for the function of practical reason is
+to compare, combine, and harmonize all our interests, with a view
+to attaining the greatest satisfactions of which our nature is capable.
+We must expect, therefore, that virtue should place the same
+restraint upon all our passions -- not from superstitious aversion to
+any one need, but from an equal concern for them all. The
+consideration to be given to our aesthetic pleasures will depend
+upon their greater or less influence upon our happiness; and as this
+influence varies in different ages and countries, and with different
+individuals, it will be right to let aesthetic demands count for more
+or for less in the organization of life.
+
+We may, indeed, according to our personal sympathies, prefer one
+type of creature to another. We may love the martial, or the angelic,
+or the political temperament. We may delight to find in others that
+balance of susceptibilities and enthusiasms which we feel in our
+own breast. But no moral precept can require one species or
+individual to change its nature in order to resemble another, since
+such a requirement can have no power or authority over those on
+whom we would impose it. All that morality can require is the
+inward harmony of each life: and if we still abhor the thought of a
+possible being who should be happy without love, or knowledge,
+or beauty, the aversion we feel is not moral but instinctive, not
+rational but human. What revolts us is not the want of excellence
+in that other creature, but his want of affinity to ourselves. Could
+we survey the whole universe, we might indeed assign to each
+species a moral dignity proportionate to its general beneficence
+and inward wealth; but such an absolute standard, if it exists, is
+incommunicable to us; and we are reduced to judging of the
+excellence of every nature by its relation to the human.
+
+All these matters, however, belong to the sphere of ethics, nor
+should we give them here even a passing notice, but for the
+influence which moral ideas exert over aesthetic judgments. Our
+sense of practical benefit not only determines the moral value of
+beauty, but sometimes even its existence as an aesthetic good.
+Especially in the right _selection_ of effects, these considerations
+have weight. Forms in themselves pleasing may become disagreeable
+when the practical interests then uppermost in the mind
+cannot, without violence, yield a place to them. Thus too
+much eloquence in a diplomatic document, or in a familiar letter,
+or in a prayer, is an offence not only against practical sense, but
+also against taste. The occasion has tuned us to a certain key of
+sentiment, and deprived us of the power to respond to other stimuli.
+
+If things of moment are before us, we cannot stop to play with
+symbols and figures of speech. We cannot attend to them with
+pleasure, and therefore they lose the beauty they might elsewhere
+have had. They are offensive, not in themselves, -- for nothing is
+intrinsically ugly, -- but by virtue of our present demand for
+something different. A prison as gay as a bazaar, a church as dumb
+as a prison, offend by their failure to support by their aesthetic
+quality the moral emotion with, which we approach them. The arts
+must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until
+they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. This is the
+consequence of the superficial stratum on which they flourish;
+their roots, as we have seen, are not deep in the world, and they
+appear only as unstable, superadded activities, employments of our
+freedom, after the work of life is done and the terror of it is allayed.
+They must, therefore, fit their forms, like parasites, to the stouter
+growths to which they cling.
+
+Herein lies the greatest difficulty and nicety of art. It must not only
+create things abstractly beautiful, but it must conciliate all the
+competitors these may have to the attention of the world, and must
+know how to insinuate their charms among the objects of our
+passion. But this subserviency and enforced humility of beauty is
+not without its virtue and reward. If the aesthetic habit lie under the
+necessity of respecting and observing our passions, it possesses the
+privilege of soothing our griefs. There is no situation so terrible
+that it may not be relieved by the momentary pause of the mind to
+contemplate it aesthetically.
+
+Grief itself becomes in this way not wholly pain; a sweetness is
+added to it by our reflection. The saddest scenes may lose their
+bitterness in their beauty. This ministration makes, as it were, the
+piety of the Muses, who succour their mother, Life, and repay her
+for their nurture by the comfort of their continual presence. The
+aesthetic world is limited in its scope; it must submit to the control
+of the organizing reason, and not trespass upon more useful and
+holy ground. The garden must not encroach upon the corn-fields;
+but the eye of the gardener may transform the corn-fields
+themselves by dint of loving observation into a garden of a soberer
+kind. By finding grandeur in our disasters, and merriment in our
+mishaps, the aesthetic sense thus mollifies both, and consoles us
+for the frequent impossibility of a serious and perfect beauty.
+
+_Negative values in the second term._
+
+§ 56. All subjects, even the most  repellent, when the
+circumstances of life thrust them before us, can thus be observed
+with curiosity and treated with art. The calling forth of these
+aesthetic functions softens the violence of our sympathetic reaction.
+If death, for instance, did not exist and did not thrust itself upon
+our thoughts with painful importunity, art would never have been
+called upon to soften and dignify it, by presenting it in beautiful
+forms and surrounding it with consoling associations. Art does not
+seek out the pathetic, the tragic, and the absurd; it is life that has
+imposed them upon our attention, and enlisted art in their service,
+to make the contemplation of them, since it is inevitable, at least as
+tolerable as possible.
+
+The agreeableness of the presentation is thus mixed with the horror
+of the thing; and the result is that while we are saddened by the
+truth we are delighted by the vehicle that conveys it to us. The
+mixture of these emotions constitutes the peculiar flavour and
+poignancy of pathos. But because unlovely objects and feelings are
+often so familiar as to be indifferent or so momentous as to be
+alone in the mind, we are led into the confusion of supposing that
+beauty depends upon them for its aesthetic value; whereas the truth
+is that only by the addition of positive beauties can these evil
+experiences be made agreeable to contemplation.
+
+There is, in reality, no such paradox in the tragic, comic, and
+sublime, as has been sometimes supposed. We are not pleased by
+virtue of the suggested evils, but in spite of them; and if ever the
+charm of the beautiful presentation sinks so low, or the vividness
+of the represented evil rises so high, that the balance is in favour of
+pain, at that very moment the whole object becomes horrible,
+passes out of the domain of art, and can be justified only by its
+scientific or moral uses. As an aesthetic value it is destroyed; it
+ceases to be a benefit; and the author of it, if he were not made
+harmless by the neglect that must soon overtake him, would have
+to be punished as a malefactor who adds to the burden of mortal
+life. For the sad, the ridiculous, the grotesque, and the terrible,
+unless they become aesthetic goods, remain moral evils.
+
+We have, therefore, to study the various aesthetic, intellectual, and
+moral compensations by which the mind can be brought to
+contemplate with pleasure a thing which, if experienced alone,
+would be the cause of pain. There is, to be sure, a way of avoiding
+this inquiry. We might assert that since all moderate excitement is
+pleasant, there is nothing strange in the fact that the representation
+of evil should please; for the experience is evil by virtue of the
+pain it gives; but it gives pain only when felt with great intensity.
+Observed from afar, it is a pleasing impression; it is vivid enough
+to interest, but not acute enough to wound. This simple explanation
+is possible in all those cases where aesthetic effect is gained by the
+inhibition of sympathy.
+
+The term "evil" is often a conventional epithet; a conflagration
+may be called an evil, because it usually involves loss and
+suffering; but if, without caring for a loss and suffering we do not
+share, we are delighted by the blaze, and still say that what pleases
+us is an evil, we are using this word as a conventional appellation,
+not as the mark of a felt value. We are not pleased by an evil; we
+are pleased by a vivid and exciting sensation, which is a good, but
+which has for objective cause an event which may indeed be an
+evil to others, but about the consequences of which we are not
+thinking at all. There is, in this sense, nothing in all nature, perhaps,
+which is not an evil; nothing which is not unfavourable to some
+interest, and does not involve some infinitesimal or ultimate
+suffering in the universe of life.
+
+But when we are ignorant or thoughtless, this suffering is to us as
+if it did not exist. The pleasures of drinking and walking are not
+tragic to us, because we may be poisoning some bacillus or
+crushing some worm. To an omniscient intelligence such acts may
+be tragic by virtue of the insight into their relations to conflicting
+impulses; but unless these impulses are present to the same mind,
+there is no consciousness of tragedy. The child that, without
+understanding of the calamity, should watch a shipwreck from the
+shore, would hare a simple emotion of pleasure as from a jumping
+jack; what passes for tragic interest is often nothing but this. If he
+understood the event, but was entirely without sympathy, he would
+have the aesthetic emotion of the careless tyrant, to whom the
+notion of suffering is no hindrance to the enjoyment of the lyre. If
+the temper of his tyranny were purposely cruel, he might add to
+that aesthetic delight the luxury of _Schadenfreude;_ but the
+pathos and horror of the sight could only appeal to a man who
+realized and shared the sufferings he beheld.
+
+A great deal of brutal tragedy has been endured in the world
+because the rudeness of the representation, or of the public, or of
+both, did not allow a really sympathetic reaction to arise. We all
+smile when Punch beats Judy in the puppet show. The treatment
+and not the subject is what makes a tragedy. A parody of _Hamlet_
+or of _King Lear_ would not be a tragedy; and these tragedies
+themselves are not wholly such, but by the strain of wit and
+nonsense they contain are, as it were, occasional parodies on
+themselves. By treating a tragic subject bombastically or satirically
+we can turn it into an amusement for the public; they will not feel
+the griefs which we have been careful to harden them against by
+arousing in them contrary emotions. A work, nominally a work of
+art, may also appeal to non-aesthetic feelings by its political bias,
+brutality, or obscenity. But if an effect of true pathos is sought, the
+sympathy of the observer must be aroused; we must awaken in him
+the emotion we describe. The intensity of the impression must not
+be so slight that its painful quality is not felt; for it is this very
+sense of pain, mingling with the aesthetic excitement of the
+spectacle, that gives it a tragic or pathetic colouring.
+
+We cannot therefore rest in the assertion that the slighter degree of
+excitement is pleasant, when a greater degree of the same would be
+disagreeable; for that principle does not express the essence of the
+matter, which is that we must be aware of the evil, and conscious
+of it as such, absorbed more or less in the experience of the
+sufferer, and consequently suffering ourselves, before we can
+experience the essence of tragic emotion. This emotion must
+therefore be complex; it must contain an element of pain
+overbalanced by an element of pleasure; in our delight there must
+be a distinguishable touch of shrinking and sorrow; for it is this
+conflict and rending of our will, this fascination by what is
+intrinsically terrible or sad, that gives these turbid feelings their
+depth and pungency.
+
+_Influence of the first term in the pleasing expression of self._
+
+§ 57. A striking proof of the compound nature of tragic effects can
+be given by a simple experiment. Remove from any drama -- say
+from _Othello_ -- the charm of the medium of presentation; reduce
+the tragedy to a mere account of the facts and of the words spoken,
+such as our newspapers almost daily contain; and the tragic dignity
+and beauty is entirely lost. Nothing remains but a disheartening
+item of human folly, which may still excite curiosity, but which
+will rather defile than purify the mind that considers it. A French
+poet has said:
+
+     Il n'est de vulgaire chagrin
+     Qua celui d'une âme vulgaire.
+
+The counterpart of this maxim is equally true. There is no noble
+sorrow except in a noble mind, because what is noble is the
+reaction upon the sorrow, the attitude of the man in its presence,
+the language in which he clothes it, the associations with which he
+surrounds it, and the fine affections and impulses which shine
+through it. Only by suffusing some sinister experience with this
+moral light, as a poet may do who carries that light within him, can
+we raise misfortune into tragedy and make it better for us to
+remember our lives than to forget them.
+
+There are times, although rare, when men are noble in the very
+moment of passion: when that passion is not unqualified, but
+already mastered by reflection and levelled with truth. Then the
+experience is itself the tragedy, and no poet is needed to make it
+beautiful in representation, since the sufferer has been an artist
+himself, and has moulded what he has endured. But usually these
+two stages have to be successive: first we suffer, afterwards we
+sing. An interval is necessary to make feeling presentable, and
+subjugate it to that form in which alone it is beautiful.
+
+This form appeals to us in itself, and without its aid no
+subject-matter could become an aesthetic object. The more terrible the
+experience described, the more powerful must the art be which is
+to transform it. For this reason prose and literalness are more
+tolerable in comedy than in tragedy; any violent passion, any
+overwhelming pain, if it is not to make us think of a demonstration
+in pathology, and bring back the smell of ether, must be rendered
+in the most exalted style. Metre, rhyme, melody, the widest nights
+of allusion, the highest reaches of fancy, are there in place. For
+these enable the mind swept by the deepest cosmic harmonies, to
+endure and absorb the shrill notes which would be intolerable in a
+poorer setting.
+
+The sensuous harmony of words, and still more the effects of
+rhythm, are indispensable at this height of emotion. Evolutionists
+have said that violent emotion naturally expresses itself in rhythm.
+That is hardly an empirical observation, nor can the expressiveness
+of rhythms be made definite enough to bear specific association
+with complex feelings. But the suspension and rush of sound and
+movement have in themselves a strong effect; we cannot undergo
+them without profound excitement; and this, like martial music,
+nerves us to courage and, by a sort of intoxication, bears us along
+amid scenes which might otherwise be sickening. The vile effect of
+literal and disjointed renderings of suffering, whether in writing or
+acting, proves how necessary is the musical quality to tragedy -- a
+fact Aristotle long ago set forth. The afflatus of rhythm, even if it
+be the pomp of the Alexandrine, sublimates the passion, and
+clarifies its mutterings into poetry. This breadth and rationality are
+necessary to art, which is not skill merely, but skill in the service
+of beauty.
+
+_Mixture of other expressions, including that of truth._
+
+§ 58. To the value of these sensuous and formal elements must be
+added the continual suggestion of beautiful and happy things,
+which no tragedy is sombre enough to exclude. Even if we do not
+go so far as to intersperse comic scenes and phrases into a pathetic
+subject, -- a rude device, since the comic passages themselves need
+that purifying which they are meant to effect, -- we must at least
+relieve our theme with pleasing associations. For this reason we
+have palaces for our scene, rank, beauty, and virtue in our heroes,
+nobility in their passions and in their fate, and altogether a sort of
+glorification of life without which tragedy would lose both in depth
+of pathos -- since things so precious are destroyed -- and in
+subtlety of charm, since things so precious are manifested.
+
+Indeed, one of the chief charms that tragedies have is the
+suggestion of what they might have been if they had not been
+tragedies. The happiness which glimmers through them, the hopes,
+loves, and ambitions of which it is made, these things fascinate us,
+and win our sympathy; so that we are all the more willing to suffer
+with our heroes, even if we are at the same time all the more
+sensitive to their suffering. Too wicked a character or too
+unrelieved a situation revolts us for this reason. We do not find
+enough expression of good to make us endure the expression of the
+evil.
+
+A curious exception to this rule, which, however, admirably
+illustrates the fundamental principle of it, is where by the diversity
+of evils represented the mind is relieved from painful absorption in
+any of them. There is a scene in _King Lear,_ where the horror of
+the storm is made to brood over at least four miseries, that of the
+king, of the fool, of Edgar in his real person, and of Edgar in his
+assumed character. The vividness of each of these portrayals, with
+its different note of pathos, keeps the mind detached and free,
+forces it to compare and reflect, and thereby to universalize the
+spectacle. Yet even here, the beautiful effect is not secured without
+some touches of good. How much is not gained by the dumb
+fidelity of the fool, and by the sublime humanity of Lear, when he
+says, "Art cold? There is a part of me is sorry for thee yet."
+
+Yet all these compensations would probably be unavailing but for
+another which the saddest things often have, -- the compensation
+of being true. Our practical and intellectual nature is deeply
+interested in truth. What describes fact appeals to us for that reason;
+it has an inalienable interest. However unpleasant truth may prove,
+we long to know it, partly perhaps because experience has shown
+us the prudence of this kind of intellectual courage, and chiefly
+because the consciousness of ignorance and the dread of the
+unknown is more tormenting than any possible discovery. A
+primitive instinct makes us turn the eyes full on any object that
+appears in the dim borderland of our field of vision -- and this all
+the more quickly, the more terrible that object threatens to be.
+
+This physical thirst for seeing has its intellectual extension. We
+covet truth, and to attain it, amid all accidents, is a supreme
+satisfaction. Now this satisfaction the representation of evil can
+also afford. Whether we hear the account of some personal
+accident, or listen to the symbolic representation of the inherent
+tragedy of life, we crave the same knowledge; the desire for truth
+makes us welcome eagerly whatever comes in its name. To be sure,
+the relief of such instruction does not of itself constitute an
+aesthetic pleasure: the other conditions of beauty remain to be
+fulfilled. But the satisfaction of so imperious an intellectual instinct
+insures our willing attention to the tragic object, and strengthens
+the hold which any beauties it may possess will take upon us. An
+intellectual value stands ready to be transmuted into an aesthetic
+one, if once its discursiveness is lost, and it is left hanging about
+the object as a vague sense of dignity and meaning.
+
+To this must be added the specific pleasure of recognition, one of
+the keenest we have, and the sentimental one of nursing our own
+griefs and dignifying them by assimilation to a less inglorious
+representation of them. Here we have truth on a small scale;
+conformity in the fiction to incidents of our personal experience.
+Such correspondences are the basis of much popular appreciation
+of trivial and undigested works that appeal to some momentary
+phase of life or feeling, and disappear with it. They have the value
+of personal stimulants only; they never achieve beauty. Like the
+souvenirs of last season's gayeties, or the diary of an early love,
+they are often hideous in themselves in proportion as they are
+redolent with personal associations. But however hopelessly mere
+history or confession may fail to constitute a work of art, a work of
+art that has an historical warrant, either literal or symbolical, gains
+the support of that vivid interest we have in facts. And many
+tragedies and farces, that to a mind without experience of this
+sublunary world might seem monstrous and disgusting fictions,
+may come to be forgiven and even perhaps preferred over all else,
+when they are found to be a sketch from life.
+
+Truth is thus the excuse which ugliness has for being. Many people,
+in whom the pursuit of knowledge and the indulgence in sentiment
+have left no room for the cultivation of the aesthetic sense, look in
+art rather for this expression of fact or of passion than for the
+revelation of beauty. They accordingly produce and admire works
+without intrinsic value. They employ the procedure of the fine arts
+without an eye to what can give pleasure in the effect. They invoke
+rather the _a priori_ interest which men are expected to have in the
+subject-matter, or in the theories and moral implied in the
+presentation of it. Instead of using the allurements of art to inspire
+wisdom, they require an appreciation of wisdom to make us endure
+their lack of art.
+
+Of course, the instruments of the arts are public property and any
+one is free to turn them to new uses. It would be an interesting
+development of civilization if they should now be employed only
+as methods of recording scientific ideas and personal confessions.
+But the experiment has not succeeded and can hardly succeed.
+There are other simpler, clearer, and more satisfying ways of
+expounding truth. A man who is really a student of history or
+philosophy will never rest with the vague and partial oracles of
+poetry, not to speak of the inarticulate suggestions of the plastic
+arts. He will at once make for the principles which art cannot
+express, even if it can embody them, and when those principles are
+attained, the works of art, if they had no other value than that of
+suggesting them, will lapse from his mind. Forms will give place
+to formulas as hieroglyphics have given place to the letters of the
+alphabet.
+
+If, on the other hand, the primary interest is really in beauty, and
+only the confusion of a moral revolution has obscured for a while
+the vision of the ideal, then as the mind regains its mastery over the
+world, and digests its new experience, the imagination will again
+be liberated, and create its forms by its inward affinities, leaving
+all the weary burden, archaeological, psychological, and ethical, to
+those whose business is not to delight. But the sudden inundation
+of science and sentiment which has made the mind of the
+nineteenth century so confused, by overloading us with materials
+and breaking up our habits of apperception and our ideals, has led
+to an exclusive sense of the value of expressiveness, until this has
+been almost identified with beauty. This exaggeration can best
+prove how the expression of truth may enter into the play of
+aesthetic forces, and give a value to representations which, but for
+it, would be repulsive.
+
+_The liberation of self._
+
+§ 59. Hitherto we have been considering those elements of a
+pathetic presentation which may mitigate our sympathetic emotion,
+and make it on the whole agreeable. These consist in the intrinsic
+beauties of the medium of presentation, and in the concomitant
+manifestation of various goods, notably of truth. The mixture of
+these values is perhaps all we have in mildly pathetic works, in the
+presence of which we are tolerably aware of a sort of balance and
+compensation of emotions. The sorrow and the beauty, the
+hopelessness and the consolation, mingle and merge into a kind of
+joy which has its poignancy, indeed, but which is far too passive
+and penitential to contain the louder and sublimer of our tragic
+moods. In these there is a wholeness, a strength, and a rapture,
+which still demands an explanation.
+
+Where this explanation is to be found may be guessed from the
+following circumstance. The pathetic is a quality of the object, at
+once lovable and sad, which we accept and allow to flow in upon
+the soul; but the heroic is an attitude of the will, by which the
+voices of the outer world are silenced, and a moral energy, flowing
+from within, is made to triumph over them. If we fail, therefore, to
+discover, by analysis of the object, anything which could make it
+sublime, we must not be surprised at our failure. We must
+remember that the object is always but a portion of our
+consciousness: that portion which has enough coherence and
+articulation to be recognized as permanent and projected into the
+outer world. But consciousness remains one, in spite of this
+diversification of its content, and the object is not really
+independent, but is in constant relation to the rest of the mind, in
+the midst of which it swims like a bubble on a dark surface of
+water.
+
+The aesthetic effect of objects is always due to the total emotional
+value of the consciousness in which they exist. We merely attribute
+this value to the object by a projection which is the ground of the
+apparent objectivity of beauty. Sometimes this value may be
+inherent in the process by which the object itself is perceived; then
+we have sensuous and formal beauty; sometimes the value may be
+due to the incipient formation of other ideas, which the perception
+of this object evokes; then we have beauty of expression. But
+among the ideas with which every object has relation there is one
+vaguest, most comprehensive, and most powerful one, namely, the
+idea of self. The impulses, memories, principles, and energies
+which we designate by that word baffle enumeration; indeed, they
+constantly fade and change into one another; and whether the self
+is anything, everything, or nothing depends on the aspect of it
+which we momentarily fix, and especially on the definite object
+with which we contrast it.
+
+Now, it is the essential privilege of beauty to so synthesize and
+bring to a focus the various impulses of the self, so to suspend
+them to a single image, that a great peace falls upon that perturbed
+kingdom. In the experience of these momentary harmonies we
+have the basis of the enjoyment of beauty, and of all its mystical
+meanings. But there are always two methods of securing harmony:
+one is to unify all the given elements, and another is to reject and
+expunge all the elements that refuse to be unified. Unity by
+inclusion gives us the beautiful; unity by exclusion, opposition,
+and isolation gives us the sublime. Both are pleasures: but the
+pleasure of the one is warm, passive, and pervasive; that of the
+other cold, imperious, and keen. The one identifies us with the
+world, the other raises us above it.
+
+There can be no difficulty in understanding how the expression of
+evil in the object may be the occasion of this heroic reaction of the
+soul. In the first place, the evil may be felt; but at the same time the
+sense that, great as it may be in itself, it cannot touch us, may
+stimulate extraordinarily the consciousness of our own wholeness.
+This is the sublimity which Lucretius calls "sweet" in the famous
+lines in which he so justly analyzes it. We are not pleased because
+another suffers an evil, but because, seeing it is an evil, we see at
+the same time our own immunity from it. We might soften the
+picture a little, and perhaps make the principle even clearer by so
+doing. The shipwreck observed from the shore does not leave us
+wholly unmoved; we suffer, also, and if possible, would help. So,
+too, the spectacle of the erring world must sadden the philosopher
+even in the Acropolis of his wisdom; he would, if it might be,
+descend from his meditation and teach. But those movements of
+sympathy are quickly inhibited by despair of success; impossibility
+of action is a great condition of the sublime. If we could count the
+stars, we should not weep before them. While we think we can
+change the drama of history, and of our own lives, we are not awed
+by our destiny. But when the evil is irreparable, when our life is
+lived, a strong spirit has the sublime resource of standing at bay
+and of surveying almost from the other world the vicissitudes of
+this.
+
+The more intimate to himself the tragedy he is able to look back
+upon with calmness, the more sublime that calmness is, and the
+more divine the ecstasy in which he achieves it. For the more of
+the accidental vesture of life we are able to strip ourselves of, the
+more naked and simple is the surviving spirit; the more complete
+its superiority and unity, and, consequently, the more unqualified
+its joy. There remains little in us, then, but that intellectual essence,
+which several great philosophers have called eternal and identified
+with the Divinity.
+
+A single illustration may help to fix these principles in the mind.
+When Othello has discovered his fatal error, and is resolved to take
+his own life, he stops his groaning, and addresses the ambassadors
+of Venice thus:
+
+     Speak of me as I am: nothing extenuate,
+     Nor set down aught in malice: then, must you speak
+     Of one that loved, not wisely, but too well;
+     Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
+     Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
+     Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
+     Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
+     Albeit unused to the melting mood,
+     Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
+     Their medicinal gum. Set you down this:
+     And say, besides, that in Aleppo once
+     When a malignant and a turbaned Turk
+     Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
+     I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
+     And smote him, thus.
+
+There is a kind of criticism that would see in all these allusions,
+figures of speech, and wandering reflections, an unnatural
+rendering of suicide. The man, we might be told, should have
+muttered a few broken phrases, and killed himself without this
+pomp of declamation, like the jealous husbands in the daily papers.
+But the conventions of the tragic stage are more favourable to
+psychological truth than the conventions of real life. If we may
+trust the imagination (and in imagination lies, as we have seen, the
+test of propriety), this is what Othello would have felt. If he had
+not expressed it, his dumbness would have been due to external
+hindrances, not to the failure in his mind of just such complex and
+rhetorical thoughts as the poet has put into his mouth. The height
+of passion is naturally complex and rhetorical. Love makes us
+poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
+When a man knows that his life is over, he can look back upon it
+from a universal standpoint. He has nothing more to live for, but if
+the energy of his mind remains unimpaired, he will still wish to
+live, and, being cut off from his personal ambitions, he will impute
+to himself a kind of vicarious immortality by identifying himself
+with what is eternal. He speaks of himself as he is, or rather as he
+was. He sums himself up, and points to his achievement. This I
+have been, says he, this I have done.
+
+This comprehensive and impartial view, this synthesis and
+objectification of experience, constitutes the liberation of the soul
+and the essence of sublimity. That the hero attains it at the end
+consoles us, as it consoles him, for his hideous misfortunes. Our
+pity and terror are indeed purged; we go away knowing that,
+however tangled the net may be in which we feel ourselves caught,
+there is liberation beyond, and an ultimate peace.
+
+_The sublime independent of the expression of evil._
+
+§ 60. So natural is the relation between the vivid conception of
+great evils, and that self-assertion of the soul which gives the
+emotion of the sublime, that the sublime is often thought to depend
+upon the terror which these conceived evils inspire. To be sure,
+that terror would have to be inhibited and subdued, otherwise we
+should have a passion too acute to be incorporated in any object;
+the sublime would not appear as an aesthetic quality in things, but
+remain merely an emotional state in the subject. But this subdued
+and objectified terror is what is commonly regarded as the essence
+of the sublime, and so great an authority as Aristotle would seem
+to countenance some such definition. The usual cause of the
+sublime is here confused, however, with the sublime itself. The
+suggestion of terror makes us withdraw into ourselves: there with
+the supervening consciousness of safety or indifference comes a
+rebound, and we have that emotion of detachment and liberation in
+which the sublime really consists.
+
+Thoughts and actions are properly sublime, and visible things only
+by analogy and suggestion when they induce a certain moral
+emotion; whereas beauty belongs properly to sensible things, and
+can be predicated of moral facts only by a figure of rhetoric. What
+we objectify in beauty is a sensation. What we objectify in the
+sublime is an act. This act is necessarily pleasant, for if it were not
+the sublime would be a bad quality and one we should rather never
+encounter in the world. The glorious joy of self-assertion in the
+face of an uncontrollable world is indeed so deep and entire, that it
+furnishes just that transcendent element of worth for which we
+were looking when we tried to understand how the expression of
+pain could sometimes please. It can please, not in itself, but
+because it is balanced and annulled by positive pleasures,
+especially by this final and victorious one of detachment. If the
+expression of evil seems necessary to the sublime, it is so only as a
+condition of this moral reaction.
+
+We are commonly too much engrossed in objects and too little
+centred in ourselves and our inalienable will, to see the sublimity
+of a pleasing prospect. We are then enticed and flattered,
+and won over to a commerce with these external goods, and
+the consummation of our happiness would lie in the perfect
+comprehension and enjoyment of their nature. This is the office of
+art and of love; and its partial fulfilment is seen in every perception
+of beauty. But when we are checked in this sympathetic endeavour
+after unity and comprehension; when we come upon a great evil or
+an irreconcilable power, we are driven to seek our happiness by the
+shorter and heroic road; then we recognize the hopeless
+foreignness of what lies before us, and stiffen ourselves against it.
+We thus for the first time reach the sense of our possible separation
+from our world, and of our abstract stability; and with this comes
+the sublime.
+
+But although experience of evil is the commonest approach to this
+attitude of mind, and we commonly become philosophers only
+after despairing of instinctive happiness, yet there is nothing
+impossible in the attainment of detachment by other channels. The
+immense is sublime as well as the terrible; and mere infinity of the
+object, like its hostile nature, can have the effect of making the
+mind recoil upon itself. Infinity, like hostility, removes us from
+things, and makes us conscious of our independence. The
+simultaneous view of many things, innumerable attractions felt
+together, produce equilibrium and indifference, as effectually as
+the exclusion of all. If we may call the liberation of the self by the
+consciousness of evil in the world, the Stoic sublime, we may
+assert that there is also an Epicurean sublime, which consists in
+liberation by equipoise. Any wide survey is sublime in that fashion.
+Each detail may be beautiful. We may even be ready with a
+passionate response to its appeal. We may think we covet every
+sort of pleasure, and lean to every kind of vigorous, impulsive life.
+But let an infinite panorama be suddenly unfolded; the will is
+instantly paralyzed, and the heart choked. It is impossible to desire
+everything at once, and when all is offered and approved, it is
+impossible to choose everything. In this suspense, the mind soars
+into a kind of heaven, benevolent but unmoved.
+
+This is the attitude of all minds to which breadth of interest or
+length of years has brought balance and dignity. The sacerdotal
+quality of old age comes from this same sympathy in disinterestedness.
+Old men full of hurry and passion appear as fools, because
+we understand that their experience has not left enough
+mark upon their brain to qualify with the memory of other
+goods any object that may be now presented. We cannot venerate
+any one in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire. And
+this elevation and detachment of the heart need not follow upon
+any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest where it is the
+gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowed into a
+natural piety. Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on
+no other model.
+
+When the pantheists try to conceive all the parts of nature as
+forming a single being, which shall contain them all and yet have
+absolute unity, they find themselves soon denying the existence of
+the world they are trying to deify; for nature, reduced to the unity it
+would assume in an omniscient mind, is no longer nature, but
+something simple and impossible, the exact opposite of the real
+world. Such an opposition would constitute the liberation of the
+divine mind from nature, and its existence as a self-conscious
+individual. The effort after comprehensiveness of view reduces
+things to unity, but this unity stands out in opposition to the
+manifold phenomena which it transcends, and rejects as unreal.
+
+Now this destruction of nature, which the metaphysicians since
+Parmenides have so often repeated (nature nevertheless surviving
+still), is but a theoretical counterpart and hypostasis of what
+happens in every man's conscience when the comprehensiveness of
+his experience lifts him into thought, into abstraction. The sense of
+the sublime is essentially mystical: it is the transcending of distinct
+perception in favour of a feeling of unity and volume. So in the
+moral sphere, we have the mutual cancelling of the passions in the
+breast that includes them all, and their final subsidence beneath the
+glance that comprehends them. This is the Epicurean approach to
+detachment and perfection; it leads by systematic acceptance of
+instinct to the same goal which the stoic and the ascetic reach by
+systematic rejection of instinct. It is thus possible to be moved to
+that self-enfranchisement which constitutes the sublime, even
+when the object contains no expression of evil.
+
+This conclusion supports that part of our definition of beauty
+which declares that the values beauty contains are all positive; a
+definition which we should have had to change if we had found
+that the sublime depended upon the suggestion of evil for its effect.
+But the sublime is not the ugly, as some descriptions of it might
+lead us to suppose; it is the supremely, the intoxicatingly beautiful.
+It is the pleasure of contemplation reaching such an intensity that it
+begins to lose its objectivity, and to declare itself, what it always
+fundamentally was, an inward passion of the soul. For while in the
+beautiful we find the perfection of life by sinking into the object, in
+the sublime we find a purer and more inalienable perfection by
+defying the object altogether. The surprised enlargement of vision,
+the sudden escape from our ordinary interests and the identification
+of ourselves with something permanent and superhuman, something
+much more abstract and inalienable than our changing personality,
+all this carries us away from the blurred objects before us,
+and raises us into a sort of ecstasy.
+
+In the trite examples of the sublime, where we speak of the vast
+mass, strength, and durability of objects, or of their sinister aspect,
+as if we were moved by them on account of our own danger, we
+seem to miss the point. For the suggestion of our own danger
+would produce a touch of fear; it would be a practical passion, or if
+it could by chance be objectified enough to become aesthetic, it
+would merely make the object hateful and repulsive, like a
+mangled corpse. The object is sublime when we forget our danger,
+when we escape from ourselves altogether, and live as it were in
+the object itself, energizing in imitation of its movement, and
+saying, "Be thou me, impetuous one!" This passage into the object,
+to live its life, is indeed a characteristic of all perfect contemplation.
+But when in thus translating ourselves we rise and play a higher
+personage, feeling the exhilaration of a life freer and wilder than
+our own, then the experience is one of sublimity. The emotion
+comes not from the situation we observe, but from the powers we
+conceive; we fail to sympathize with the struggling sailors because
+we sympathize too much with the wind and waves. And this
+mystical cruelty can extend even to ourselves; we can so feel the
+fascination of the cosmic forces that engulf us as to take a fierce
+joy in the thought of our own destruction. We can identify
+ourselves with the abstractest essence of reality, and, raised to that
+height, despise the human accidents of our own nature. Lord, we
+say, though thou slay me, yet will I trust in thee. The sense of
+suffering disappears in the sense of life and the imagination
+overwhelms the understanding.
+
+_The comic._
+
+§ 61. Something analogous takes place in the other spheres where
+an aesthetic value seems to arise out of suggestions of evil, in the
+comic, namely, and the grotesque. But here the translation of our
+sympathies is partial, and we are carried away from ourselves only
+to become smaller. The larger humanity, which cannot be absorbed,
+remains ready to contradict the absurdity of our fiction. The
+excellence of comedy lies in the invitation to wander along some
+by-path of the fancy, among scenes not essentially impossible, but
+not to be actually enacted by us on account of the fixed
+circumstances of our lives. If the picture is agreeable, we allow
+ourselves to dream it true. We forget its relations; we forbid the
+eye to wander beyond the frame of the stage, or the conventions of
+the fiction. We indulge an illusion which deepens our sense of the
+essential pleasantness of things.
+
+So far, there is nothing in comedy that is not delightful, except,
+perhaps, the moment when it is over. But fiction, like all error or
+abstraction, is necessarily unstable; and the awakening is not
+always reserved for the disheartening moment at the end.
+Everywhere, when we are dealing with pretension or mistake, we
+come upon sudden and vivid contradictions; changes of view,
+transformations of apperception which are extremely stimulating to
+the imagination. We have spoken of one of these: when the sudden
+dissolution of our common habits of thought lifts us into a mystical
+contemplation, filled with the sense of the sublime; when the
+transformation is back to common sense and reality, and away
+from some fiction, we have a very different emotion. We feel
+cheated, relieved, abashed, or amused, in proportion as our
+sympathy attaches more to the point of view surrendered or to that
+attained.
+
+The disintegration of mental forms and their redintegration is the
+life of the imagination. It is a spiritual process of birth and death,
+nutrition and generation. The strongest emotions accompany these
+changes, and vary infinitely with their variations. All the qualities
+of discourse, wit, eloquence, cogency, absurdity, are feelings
+incidental to this process, and involved in the juxtapositions,
+tensions, and resolutions of our ideas. Doubtless the last
+explanation of these things would be cerebral; but we are as yet
+confined to verbal descriptions and classifications of them, which
+are always more or less arbitrary.
+
+The most conspicuous headings under which comic effects are
+gathered are perhaps incongruity and degradation. But clearly it
+cannot be the logical essence of incongruity or degradation that
+constitutes the comic; for then contradiction and deterioration
+would always amuse. Amusement is a much more directly physical
+thing. We may be amused without any idea at all, as when we are
+tickled, or laugh in sympathy with others by a contagious imitation
+of their gestures. We may be amused by the mere repetition of a
+thing at first not amusing. There must therefore be some nervous
+excitement on which the feeling of amusement directly depends,
+although this excitement may most often coincide with a sudden
+transition to an incongruous or meaner image. Nor can we suppose
+that particular ideational excitement to be entirely dissimilar to all
+others; wit is often hardly distinguishable from brilliancy, as
+humour from pathos. We must, therefore, be satisfied with saying
+vaguely that the process of ideation involves various feelings of
+movement and relation, -- feelings capable of infinite gradation
+and complexity, and ranging from sublimity to tedium and from
+pathos to uncontrollable merriment.
+
+Certain crude and obvious cases of the comic seem to consist of
+little more than a shock of surprise: a pun is a sort of jack-in-the-box,
+popping from nowhere into our plodding thoughts. The liveliness
+of the interruption, and its futility, often please; _dulce est
+desipere in loco;_ and yet those who must endure the society of
+inveterate jokers know how intolerable this sort of scintillation can
+become. There is something inherently vulgar about it; perhaps
+because our train of thought cannot be very entertaining in itself
+when we are so glad to break in upon it with irrelevant nullities.
+The same undertone of disgust mingles with other amusing
+surprises, as when a dignified personage slips and falls, or some
+disguise is thrown off, or those things are mentioned and described
+which convention ignores. The novelty and the freedom please, yet
+the shock often outlasts the pleasure, and we have cause to wish
+we had been stimulated by something which did not involve this
+degradation. So, also, the impossibility in plausibility which tickles
+the fancy in Irish bulls, and in wild exaggerations, leaves an
+uncomfortable impression, a certain aftertaste of foolishness.
+
+The reason will be apparent if we stop to analyze the situation. We
+have a prosaic background of common sense and every-day reality;
+upon this background an unexpected idea suddenly impinges. But
+the thing is a futility. The comic accident falsifies the nature before
+us, starts a wrong analogy in the mind, a suggestion that cannot be
+carried out. In a word, we are in the presence of an absurdity; and
+man, being a rational animal, can like absurdity no better than he
+can like hunger or cold. A pinch of either may not be so bad, and
+he will endure it merrily enough if you repay him with abundance
+of warm victuals; so, too, he will play with all kinds of nonsense
+for the sake of laughter and good fellowship and the tickling of his
+fancy with a sort of caricature of thought. But the qualm remains,
+and the pleasure is never perfect. The same exhilaration might
+have come without the falsification, just as repose follows more
+swiftly after pleasant than after painful exertions.
+
+Fun is a good thing, but only when it spoils nothing better. The
+best place for absurdity is in the midst of what is already absurd --
+then we have the play of fancy without the sense of ineptitude.
+Things amuse us in the mouth of a fool that would not amuse us in
+that of a gentleman; a fact which shows how little incongruity and
+degradation have to do with our pleasure in the comic. In fact,
+there is a kind of congruity and method even in fooling. The
+incongruous and the degraded displease us even there, as by their
+nature they must at all times. The shock which they bring may
+sometimes be the occasion of a subsequent pleasure, by attracting
+our attention, or by stimulating passions, such as scorn, or cruelty,
+or self-satisfaction (for there is a good deal of malice in our love of
+fun); but the incongruity and degradation, as such, always remain
+unpleasant. The pleasure comes from the inward rationality and
+movement of the fiction, not from its inconsistency with anything
+else. There are a great many topsy-turvy worlds possible to our
+fancy, into which we like to drop at times. We enjoy the
+stimulation and the shaking up of our wits. It is like getting into a
+new posture, or hearing a new song.
+
+Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited. For
+reason, after all, is one convention picked out of a thousand. We
+love expansion, not disorder, and when we attain freedom without
+incongruity we have a much greater and a much purer delight. The
+excellence of wit can dispense with absurdity. For on the same
+prosaic background of common sense, a novelty might have
+appeared that was not absurd, that stimulated the attention quite as
+much as the ridiculous, without so baffling the intelligence. This
+purer and more thoroughly delightful amusement comes from what
+we call wit.
+
+_Wit._
+
+§ 62. Wit also depends upon transformation and substitution of
+ideas. It has been said to consist in quick association by similarity.
+The substitution must here be valid, however, and the similarity
+real, though unforeseen. Unexpected justness makes wit, as sudden
+incongruity makes pleasant foolishness. It is characteristic of wit to
+penetrate into hidden depths of things, to pick out there some
+telling circumstance or relation, by noting which the whole object
+appears in a new and clearer light. Wit often seems malicious
+because analysis in discovering common traits and universal
+principles assimilates things at the poles of being; it can apply to
+cookery the formulas of theology, and find in the human heart a
+case of the fulcrum and lever. We commonly keep the departments
+of experience distinct; we think that different principles hold in
+each and that the dignity of spirit is inconsistent with the
+explanation of it by physical analogy, and the meanness of matter
+unworthy of being an illustration of moral truths. Love must not be
+classed under physical cravings, nor faith under hypnotization.
+When, therefore, an original mind overleaps these boundaries, and
+recasts its categories, mixing up our old classifications, we feel that
+the values of things are also confused. But these depended upon a
+deeper relation, upon their response to human needs and
+aspirations. All that can be changed by the exercise of intelligence
+is our sense of the unity and homogeneity of the world. We may
+come to hold an object of thought in less isolated respect, and
+another in less hasty derision; but the pleasures we derive from all,
+or our total happiness and wonder, will hardly be diminished. For
+this reason the malicious or destructive character of intelligence
+must not be regarded as fundamental. Wit belittles one thing and
+dignifies another; and its comparisons are as often flattering as
+ironical.
+
+The same process of mind that we observed in wit gives rise to
+those effects we call charming, brilliant, or inspired. When
+Shakespeare says,
+
+     Come and kiss me, _sweet and twenty,_
+     Youth's a stuff will not endure,
+
+the fancy of the phrase consists in a happy substitution, a merry
+way of saying something both true and tender. And where could
+we find a more exquisite charm? So, to take a weightier example,
+when St. Augustine is made to say that pagan virtues were
+_splendid vices,_ we have -- at least if we catch the full meaning --
+a pungent assimilation of contrary things, by force of a powerful
+principle; a triumph of theory, the boldness of which can only be
+matched by its consistency. In fact, a phrase could not be more
+brilliant, or better condense one theology and two civilizations.
+The Latin mind is particularly capable of this sort of excellence.
+Tacitus alone could furnish a hundred examples. It goes with the
+power of satirical and bitter eloquence, a sort of scornful rudeness
+of intelligence, that makes for the core of a passion or of a
+character, and affixes to it a more or less scandalous label. For in
+our analytical zeal it is often possible to condense and abstract too
+much. Reality is more fluid and elusive than reason, and has, as it
+were, more dimensions than are known even to the latest geometry.
+Hence the understanding, when not suffused with some glow of
+sympathetic emotion or some touch of mysticism, gives but a dry,
+crude image of the world. The quality of wit inspires more
+admiration than confidence. It is a merit we should miss little in
+any one we love.
+
+The same principle, however, can have more sentimental
+embodiments. When our substitutions are brought on by the
+excitement of generous emotion, we call wit inspiration. There is
+the same finding of new analogies, and likening of disparate things;
+there is the same transformation of our apperception. But the
+brilliancy is here not only penetrating, but also exalting. For
+instance:
+
+     Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
+          He hath awakened from the dream of life:
+     'Tis we that wrapped in stormy visions keep
+          With phantoms an unprofitable strife.
+
+There is here paradox, and paradox justified by reflection. The poet
+analyzes, and analyzes without reserve. The dream, the storm, the
+phantoms, and the unprofitableness could easily make a satirical
+picture. But the mood is transmuted; the mind takes an upward
+flight, with a sense of liberation from the convention it dissolves,
+and of freer motion in the vagueness beyond. The disintegration of
+our ideal here leads to mysticism, and because of this effort
+towards transcendence, the brilliancy becomes sublime.
+
+_Humour._
+
+§ 63. A different mood can give a different direction to the same
+processes. The sympathy by which we reproduce the feeling of
+another, is always very much opposed to the aesthetic attitude to
+which the whole world is merely a stimulus to our sensibility. In
+the tragic, we have seen how the sympathetic feeling, by which
+suffering is appreciated and shared, has to be overlaid by many
+incidental aesthetic pleasures, if the resulting effect is to be on the
+whole good. We have also seen how the only way in which the
+ridiculous can be kept within the sphere of the aesthetically good is
+abstracting it from its relations, and treating it as an independent
+and curious stimulus; we should stop laughing and begin to be
+annoyed if we tried to make sense out of our absurdity. The less
+sympathy we have with men the more exquisite is our enjoyment
+of their folly: satirical delight is closely akin to cruelty. Defect and
+mishap stimulate our fancy, as blood and tortures excite in us the
+passions of the beast of prey. The more this inhuman attitude
+yields to sympathy and reason, the less are folly and error capable
+of amusing us. It would therefore seem impossible that we should
+be pleased by the foibles or absurdities of those we love. And in
+fact we never enjoy seeing our own persons in a satirical light, or
+any one else for whom we really feel affection. Even in farces, the
+hero and heroine are seldom made ridiculous, because that would
+jar upon the sympathy with which we are expected to regard them.
+Nevertheless, the essence of what we call humour is that amusing
+weaknesses should be combined with an amicable humanity.
+Whether it be in the way of ingenuity, or oddity, or drollery, the
+humorous person must have an absurd side, or be placed in an
+absurd situation. Yet this comic aspect, at which we ought to wince,
+seems to endear the character all the more. This is a parallel case to
+that of tragedy, where the depth of the woe we sympathize with
+seems to add to our satisfaction. And the explanation of the
+paradox is the same. We do not enjoy the expression of evil, but
+only the pleasant excitements that come with it; namely, the
+physical stimulus and the expression of good. In tragedy, the
+misfortunes help to give the impression of truth, and to bring out
+the noble qualities of the hero, but are in themselves depressing, so
+much so that over-sensitive people cannot enjoy the beauty of the
+representation. So also in humour, the painful suggestions are felt
+as such, and need to be overbalanced by agreeable elements. These
+come from both directions, from the aesthetic and the sympathetic
+reaction. On the one hand there is the sensuous and merely
+perceptive stimulation, the novelty, the movement, the vivacity of
+the spectacle. On the other hand, there is the luxury of imaginative
+sympathy, the mental assimilation of another congenial experience,
+the expansion into another life.
+
+The juxtaposition of these two pleasures produces just that tension
+and complication in which the humorous consists. We are satirical,
+and we are friendly at the same time. The consciousness of the
+friendship gives a regretful and tender touch to the satire, and the
+sting of the satire makes the friendship a trifle humble and sad.
+Don Quixote is mad; he is old, useless, and ridiculous, but he is the
+soul of honour, and in all his laughable adventures we follow him
+like the ghost of our better selves. We enjoy his discomfitures too
+much to wish he had been a perfect Amadis; and we have besides a
+shrewd suspicion that he is the only kind of Amadis there can ever
+be in this world. At the same time it does us good to see the
+courage of his idealism, the ingenuity of his wit, and the simplicity
+of his goodness. But how shall we reconcile our sympathy with his
+dream and our perception of its absurdity? The situation is
+contradictory. We are drawn to some different point of view, from
+which the comedy may no longer seem so amusing. As humour
+becomes deep and really different from satire, it changes into
+pathos, and passes out of the sphere of the comic altogether. The
+mischances that were to amuse us as scoffers now grieve us as men,
+and the value of the representation depends on the touches of
+beauty and seriousness with which it is adorned.
+
+_The grotesque._
+
+§ 64. Something analogous to humour can appear in plastic forms,
+when we call it the grotesque. This is an interesting effect
+produced by such a transformation of an ideal type as exaggerates
+one of its elements or combines it with other types. The real
+excellence of this, like that of all fiction, consists in re-creation; in
+the formation of a thing which nature has not, but might
+conceivably have offered. We call these inventions comic and
+grotesque when we are considering their divergence from the
+natural rather than their inward possibility. But the latter
+constitutes their real charm; and the more we study and develope
+them, the better we understand it. The incongruity with the
+conventional type than disappears, and what was impossible and
+ridiculous at first takes its place among recognized ideals. The
+centaur and the satyr are no longer grotesque; the type is accepted.
+And the grotesqueness of an individual has essentially the same
+nature. If we like the inward harmony, the characteristic balance of
+his features, we are able to disengage this individual from the class
+into which we were trying to force him; we can forget the
+expectation which he was going to disappoint. The ugliness then
+disappears, and only the reassertion of the old habit and demand
+can make us regard him as in any way extravagant.
+
+What appears as grotesque may be intrinsically inferior or superior
+to the normal. That is a question of its abstract material and form.
+But until the new object impresses its form on our imagination, so
+that we can grasp its unity and proportion, it appears to us as a
+jumble and distortion of other forms. If this confusion is absolute,
+the object is simply null; it does not exist aesthetically, except by
+virtue of materials. But if the confusion is not absolute, and we
+have an inkling of the unity and character in the midst of the
+strangeness of the form, then we have the grotesque. It is the
+half-formed, the perplexed, and the suggestively monstrous.
+
+The analogy to the comic is very close, as we can readily conceive
+that it should be. In the comic we have this same juxtaposition of a
+new and an old idea, and if the new is not futile and really
+inconceivable, it may in time establish itself in the mind, and cease
+to be ludicrous. Good wit is novel truth, as the good grotesque is
+novel beauty. But there are natural conditions of organization, and
+we must not mistake every mutilation for the creation of a new
+form. The tendency of nature to establish well-marked species of
+animals shows what various combinations are most stable in the
+face of physical forces, and there is a fitness also for survival in the
+mind, which is determined by the relation of any form to our fixed
+method of perception. New things are therefore generally bad
+because, as has been well said, they are incapable of becoming old.
+A thousand originalities are produced by defect of faculty, for one
+that is produced by genius. For in the pursuit of beauty, as in that
+of truth, an infinite number of paths lead to failure, and only one to
+success.
+
+_The possibility of finite perfection._
+
+§ 65. If these observations have any accuracy, they confirm this
+important truth, -- that no aesthetic value is really founded on the
+experience or the suggestion of evil. This conclusion will doubtless
+seem the more interesting if we think of its possible extension to
+the field of ethics and of the implied vindication of the ideal of
+moral perfection as something essentially definable and attainable.
+But without insisting on an analogy to ethics, which might be
+misleading, we may hasten to state the principle which emerges
+from our analysis of expression. Expressiveness may be found in
+any one thing that suggests another, or draws from association with
+that other any of its emotional colouring. There may, therefore, of
+course, be an expressiveness of evil; but this expressiveness will
+not have any aesthetic value. The description or suggestion of
+suffering may have a worth as science or discipline, but can never
+in itself enhance any beauty. Tragedy and comedy please in spite
+of this expressiveness and not by virtue of it; and except for the
+pleasures they give, they have no place among the fine arts. Nor
+have they, in such a case, any place in human life at all; unless they
+are instruments of some practical purpose and serve to preach a
+moral, or achieve a bad notoriety. For ugly things can attract
+attention, although they cannot keep it; and the scandal of a new
+horror may secure a certain vulgar admiration which follows
+whatever is momentarily conspicuous, and which is attained even
+by crime. Such admiration, however, has nothing aesthetic about it,
+and is only made possible by the bluntness of our sense of beauty.
+
+The effect of the pathetic and comic is therefore never pure; since
+the expression of some evil is mixed up with those elements by
+which the whole appeals to us. These elements we have seen to be
+the truth of the presentation, which involves the pleasures of
+recognition and comprehension, the beauty of the medium, and the
+concomitant expression of things intrinsically good. To these
+sources all the aesthetic value of comic and tragic is due; and the
+sympathetic emotion which arises from the spectacle of evil must
+never be allowed to overpower these pleasures of contemplation,
+else the entire object becomes distasteful and loses its excuse for
+being. Too exclusive a relish for the comic and pathetic is
+accordingly a sign of bad taste and of comparative insensibility to
+beauty.
+
+This situation has generally been appreciated in the practice of the
+arts, where effect is perpetually studied; but the greatest care has
+not always succeeded in avoiding the dangers of the pathetic, and
+history is full of failures due to bombast, caricature, and
+unmitigated horror. In all these the effort to be expressive has
+transgressed the conditions of pleasing effect. For the creative and
+imitative impulse is indiscriminate. It does not consider the
+eventual beauty of the effect, but only the blind instinct of
+self-expression. Hence an untrained and not naturally sensitive mind
+cannot distinguish or produce anything good. This critical
+incapacity has always been a cause of failure and a just ground for
+ridicule; but it remained for some thinkers of our time -- a time of
+little art and much undisciplined production -- to erect this abuse
+into a principle and declare that the essence of beauty is to express
+the artist and not to delight the world. But the conditions of effect,
+and the possibility of pleasing, are the only criterion of what is
+capable and worthy of expression. Art exists and has value by its
+adaptation to these universal conditions of beauty.
+
+Nothing but the good of life enters into the texture of the beautiful.
+What charms us in the comic, what stirs us in the sublime and
+touches us in the pathetic, is a glimpse of some good; imperfection
+has value only as an incipient perfection. Could the labours and
+sufferings of life be reduced, and a better harmony between man
+and nature be established, nothing would be lost to the arts; for the
+pure and ultimate value of the comic is discovery, of the pathetic,
+love, of the sublime, exaltation; and these would still subsist.
+Indeed, they would all be increased; and it has ever been,
+accordingly, in the happiest and most prosperous moments of
+humanity, when the mind and the world were knit into a brief
+embrace, that natural beauty has been best perceived, and art has
+won its triumphs. But it sometimes happens, in moments less
+propitious, that the soul is subdued to what it works in, and loses
+its power of idealization and hope. By a pathetic and superstitious
+self-depreciation, we then punish ourselves for the imperfection of
+nature. Awed by the magnitude of a reality that we can no longer
+conceive as free from evil, we try to assert that its evil also is a
+good; and we poison the very essence of the good to make its
+extension universal. We confuse the causal connexion of those
+things in nature which we call good or evil by an adventitious
+denomination with the logical opposition between good and evil
+themselves; because one generation makes room for another, we
+say death is necessary to life; and because the causes of sorrow and
+joy are so mingled in this world, we cannot conceive how, in a
+better world, they might be disentangled.
+
+This incapacity of the imagination to reconstruct the conditions of
+life and build the frame of things nearer to the heart's desire is
+dangerous to a steady loyalty to what is noble and fine. We
+surrender ourselves to a kind of miscellaneous appreciation,
+without standard or goal; and calling every vexatious apparition by
+the name of beauty, we become incapable of discriminating its
+excellence or feeling its value. We need to clarify our ideals, and
+enliven our vision of perfection. No atheism is so terrible as the
+absence of an ultimate ideal, nor could any failure of power be
+more contrary to human nature than the failure of moral
+imagination, or more incompatible with healthy life. For we have
+faculties, and habits, and impulses. These are the basis of our
+demands. And these demands, although variable, constitute an
+ever-present intrinsic standard of value by which we feel and judge.
+The ideal is immanent in them; for the ideal means that
+environment in which our faculties would find their freest
+employment, and their most congenial world. Perfection would be
+nothing but life under those conditions. Accordingly our
+consciousness of the ideal becomes distinct in proportion as we
+advance in virtue and in proportion to the vigour and definiteness
+with which our faculties work. When the vital harmony is
+complete, when the _act_ is _pure,_ faith in perfection passes into
+vision. That man is unhappy indeed, who in all his life has had no
+glimpse of perfection, who in the ecstasy of love, or in the delight
+of contemplation, has never been able to say: It is attained. Such
+moments of inspiration are the source of the arts, which have no
+higher function than to renew them.
+
+A work of art is indeed a monument to such a moment, the
+memorial to such a vision; and its charm varies with its power of
+recalling us from the distractions of common life to the joy of a
+more natural and perfect activity.
+
+_The stability of the ideal._
+
+§ 66. The perfection thus revealed is relative to our nature and
+faculties; if it were not, it could have no value for us. It is revealed
+to us in brief moments, but it is not for that reason an unstable or
+fantastic thing. Human attention inevitably flickers; we survey
+things in succession, and our acts of synthesis and our realization
+of fact are only occasional. This is the tenure of all our possessions;
+we are not uninterruptedly conscious of ourselves, our physical
+environment, our ruling passions, or our deepest conviction. What
+wonder, then, that we are not constantly conscious of that
+perfection which is the implicit ideal of all our preferences and
+desires? We view it only in parts, as passion or perception
+successively directs our attention to its various elements. Some of
+us never try to conceive it in its totality. Yet our whole life is an act
+of worship to this unknown divinity; every heartfelt prayer is
+offered before one or another of its images.
+
+This ideal of perfection varies, indeed, but only with the variations
+of our nature of which it is the counterpart and entelechy. There is
+perhaps no more frivolous notion than that to which Schopenhauer
+has given a new currency, that a good, once attained, loses all its
+value. The instability of our attention, the need of rest and repair in
+our organs, makes a round of objects necessary to our minds; but
+we turn from a beautiful thing, as from a truth or a friend, only to
+return incessantly, and with increasing appreciation. Nor do we
+lose all the benefit of our achievements in the intervals between
+our vivid realizations of what we have gained. The tone of the
+mind is permanently raised; and we live with that general sense of
+steadfastness and resource which is perhaps the kernel of
+happiness. Knowledge, affection, religion, and beauty are not less
+constant influences in a man's life because his consciousness of
+them is intermittent. Even when absent, they fill the chambers of
+the mind with a kind of fragrance. They have a continual efficacy,
+as well as a perennial worth.
+
+There are, indeed, other objects of desire that if attained leave
+nothing but restlessness and dissatisfaction behind them. These are
+the objects pursued by fools. That such objects ever attract us is a
+proof of the disorganization of our nature, which drives us in
+contrary directions and is at war with itself. If we had attained
+anything like steadiness of thought or fixity of character, if we
+knew ourselves, we should know also our inalienable satisfactions.
+To say that all goods become worthless in possession is either a
+piece of superficial satire that intentionally denies the normal in
+order to make the abnormal seem more shocking, or else it is a
+confession of frivolity, a confession that, as an idiot never learns to
+distinguish reality amid the phantasms of his brain, so we have
+never learned to distinguish true goods amid our extravagances of
+whim and passion. That true goods exist is nevertheless a fact of
+moral experience. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"; a great
+affection, a clear thought, a profound and well-tried faith, are
+eternal possessions. And this is not merely a fact, to be asserted
+upon the authority of those who know it by experience. It is a
+psychological necessity. While we retain the same senses, we must
+get the same impressions from the same objects; while we keep our
+instincts and passions, we must pursue the same goods; while we
+hare the same powers of imagination, we must experience the same
+delight in their exercise. Age brings about, of course, variation in
+all these particulars, and the susceptibility of two individuals is
+never exactly similar. But the eventual decay of our personal
+energies does not destroy the natural value of objects, so long as
+the same will embodies itself in other minds, and human nature
+subsists in the world. The sun is not now unreal because each one
+of us in succession, and all of us in the end, must close our eyes
+upon it; and yet the sun exists for us only because we perceive it.
+The ideal has the same conditions of being, but has this advantage
+over the sun, that we cannot know if its light is ever destined to fail
+us.
+
+There is then a broad foundation of identity in our nature, by virtue
+of which we live in a common world, and have an art and a
+religion in common. That the ideal should be constant within these
+limits is as inevitable as that it should vary beyond them. And so
+long as we exist and recognize ourselves individually as persons or
+collectively as human, we must recognize also our immanent ideal,
+the realization of which would constitute perfection for us. That
+ideal cannot be destroyed except in proportion as we ourselves
+perish. An absolute perfection, independent of human nature and
+its variations, may interest the metaphysician; but the artist and the
+man will be satisfied with a perfection that is inseparable from the
+consciousness of mankind, since it is at once the natural vision of
+the imagination, and the rational goal of the will.
+
+_Conclusion._
+
+§ 67. We have now studied the sense of beauty in what seem to be
+its fundamental manifestations, and in some of the more striking
+complications which it undergoes. In surveying so broad a field we
+stand in need of some classification and subdivision; and we have
+chosen the familiar one of matter, form, and expression, as least
+likely to lead us into needless artificiality. But artificiality there
+must always be in the discursive description of anything given in
+consciousness. Psychology attempts what is perhaps impossible,
+namely, the anatomy of life. Mind is a fluid; the lights and
+shadows that flicker through it have no real boundaries, and no
+possibility of permanence. Our whole classification of mental facts
+is borrowed from the physical conditions or expressions of them.
+The very senses are distinguished because of the readiness with
+which we can isolate their outer organs. Ideas can be identified
+only by identifying their objects. Feelings are recognized by their
+outer expression, and when we try to recall an emotion, we must
+do so by recalling the circumstances in which it occurred.
+
+In distinguishing, then, in our sense of beauty, an appreciation of
+sensible material, one of abstract form, and another of associated
+values, we have been merely following the established method of
+psychology, the only one by which it is possible to analyze the
+mind. We have distinguished the elements of the object, and
+treated the feeling as if it were composed of corresponding parts.
+The worlds of nature and fancy, which are the object of aesthetic
+feeling, can be divided into parts in space and time.  We can then
+distinguish the material of things from the various forms it may
+successively assume; we can distinguish, also, the earlier and the
+later impressions made by the same object; and we can ascertain
+the coexistence of one impression with another, or with the
+memory of others. But aesthetic feeling itself has no parts, and this
+physiology of its causes is not a description of its proper nature.
+
+Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what
+it means can never be said.  By appealing to experiment and
+memory we can show that this feeling varies as certain things vary
+in the objective conditions; that it varies with the frequency, for
+instance, with which a form has been presented, or with the
+associates which that form has had in the past. This will justify a
+description of the feeling as composed of the various contributions
+of these objects. But the feeling itself knows nothing of
+composition nor contributions. It is an affection of the soul, a
+consciousness of joy and security, a pang, a dream, a pure pleasure.
+It suffuses an object without telling why; nor has it any need to ask
+the question. It justifies itself and the vision it gilds; nor is there
+any meaning in seeking for a cause of it, in this inward sense.
+Beauty exists for the same reason that the object which is beautiful
+exists, or the world in which that object lies, or we that look upon
+both. It is an experience: there is nothing more to say about it.
+Indeed, if we look at things teleologically, and as they ultimately
+justify themselves to the heart, beauty is of all things what least
+calls for explanation. For matter and space and time and principles
+of reason and of evolution, all are ultimately brute, unaccountable
+data. We may describe what actually is, but it might have been
+otherwise, and the mystery of its being is as baffling and dark as
+ever.
+
+But we, -- the minds that ask all questions and judge of the validity
+of all answers, -- we are not ourselves independent of this world in
+which we live. We sprang from it, and our relations in it determine
+all our instincts and satisfactions. This final questioning and sense
+of mystery is an unsatisfied craving which nature has her way of
+stilling. Now we only ask for reasons when we are surprised. If we
+had no expectations we should have no surprises. And what gives
+us expectation is the spontaneous direction of our thought,
+determined by the structure of our brain and the effects of our
+experience. If our spontaneous thoughts came to run in harmony
+with the course of nature, if our expectations were then continually
+fulfilled, the sense of mystery would vanish. We should be
+incapable of asking why the world existed or had such a nature,
+just as we are now little inclined to ask why anything is right, but
+mightily disinclined to give up asking why anything is wrong.
+
+This satisfaction of our reason, due to the harmony between our
+nature and our experience, is partially realized already. The sense
+of beauty is its realization. When our senses and imagination find
+what they crave, when the world so shapes itself or so moulds the
+mind that the correspondence between them is perfect, then
+perception is pleasure, and existence needs no apology. The duality
+which is the condition of conflict disappears. There is no inward
+standard different from the outward fact with which that outward
+fact may be compared. A unification of this kind is the goal of our
+intelligence and of our affection, quite as much as of our aesthetic
+sense; but we have in those departments fewer examples of success.
+In the heat of speculation or of love there may come moments of
+equal perfection, but they are unstable. The reason and the heart
+remain deeply unsatisfied. But the eye finds in nature, and in some
+supreme achievements of art, constant and fuller satisfaction. For
+the eye is quick, and seems to have been more docile to the
+education of life than the heart or the reason of man, and able
+sooner to adapt itself to the reality. Beauty therefore seems to be
+the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its
+possibility. If perfection is, as it should be, the ultimate
+justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral
+dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity
+between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in
+the supremacy of the good.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+1  Schopenhauer, indeed, who makes much of it, was a good critic,
+but his psychology suffered much from the pessimistic generalities
+of his system. It concerned him to show that the will was bad, and,
+as he felt beauty to be a good if not a holy thing, he hastened to
+convince himself that it came from the suppression of the will. But
+even in his system this suppression is only relative. The desire of
+individual objects, indeed, is absent in the perception of beauty,
+but there is still present that initial love of the general type and
+principles of things which is the first illusion of the absolute, and
+drives it on to the fatal experiment of creation. So that, apart from
+Schopenhauer's mythology, we have even in him the recognition
+that beauty gives satisfaction to some dim and underlying demand
+of our nature, just as particular objects give more special and
+momentary pleasures to our individualized wills. His psychology
+was, however, far too vague and general to undertake an analysis
+of those mysterious feelings.
+
+2  Cf. Stendhal, _De L'Amour, passim._
+
+3  This is not the place to enter into a discussion of the
+metaphysical value of the idea of space. Suffice it to point out that
+in human experience serviceable knowledge of our environment is
+to be had only in spatial symbols, and, for whatever reason or
+accident, this is the language which the mind must speak if it is to
+advance in clearness and efficiency.
+
+4  The discussion is limited in this chapter to visible form, audible
+form is probably capable of a parallel treatment, but requires
+studies too technical for this place.
+
+5  The relation to stability also makes us sensitive to certain kinds
+of symmetry; but this is an adventitious consideration with which
+we are not concerned.
+
+6  Cf. Fechner, _Vorschule der Aesthetik,_ Erster Theil, S. 73, a
+passage by which the following classification of forms was first
+suggested.
+
+7  See Introduction, p. 12.
+
+8  The contention of Burke that the beautiful is small is due to an
+arbitrary definition. By beautiful he means pretty and charming;
+agreeable as opposed to impressive. He only exaggerates the then
+usual opposition of the beautiful to the sublime.
+
+9  When we speak of things definite in themselves, we of course
+mean things made definite by some human act of definition. The
+senses are instruments that define and differentiate sensation; and
+the result of one operation is that definite object upon which the
+next operation is performed. The memory, for example, classifies
+in time what the senses may have classified in space. We are
+nowhere concerned with objects other than objects of human
+experience, and the epithets, definite and indefinite, refer
+necessarily to their relation to our various categories of perception
+and comprehension.
+
+10  In the Aegina marbles the wounded and dying warriors still
+wear this Buddha-like expression: their bodies, although
+conventional, show a great progress in observation, compared with
+the impossible Athena in the centre with her sacred feet in
+Egyptian profile and her owl-like visage.
+
+11  Symposium of Xenophon, V.
+
+12  It is a superstition to suppose that a refined taste would
+necessarily find the actual and useful to be the perfect; to conceal
+structure is as legitimate as to emphasize it, and for the name
+reason. We emphasize in the direction of abstract beauty,  in the
+direction of absolute pleasure; and we conceal or eliminate in the
+same direction. The most exquisite Greek taste, for instance,
+preferred to drape the lower part of the female figure, as in the
+Venus of Milo; also in men to shave the hair of the face and body,
+in order to maintain the purity and strength of the lines. In the one
+case we conceal structure, in the other we reveal it, modifying
+nature into greater sympathy with our faculties of perception. For,
+after all, it must be remembered that beauty, or pleasure to be
+given to the eye, is not a guiding principle in the world of nature or
+in that of the practical arts. The beauty is in nature a result of the
+functional adaptation of our senses and imagination to the
+mechanical products of our environment. This adaptation is never
+complete, and there is, accordingly, room for the fine arts, in which
+beauty is a result of the intentional adaptation of mechanical forms
+to the functions which our senses and imagination already have
+acquired. This watchful subservience to our aesthetic demands is
+the essence of fine art. Nature is the basis, but man is the goal.
+
+13  Not only are words untranslatable when the exact object has no
+name in another language, as "home" or "mon ami," but even when
+the object is the same, the attitude toward it, incorporated in one
+word, cannot be rendered by another. Thus, to my sense, "bread" is
+as inadequate a translation of the human intensity of the Spanish
+"pan" as "Dios" is of the awful mystery of the English "God." This
+latter word does not designate an object at all, but a sentiment, a
+psychosis, not to say a whole chapter of religious history. English
+is remarkable for the intensity and variety of the colour of its
+words. No language, I believe, has so many words specifically
+poetic.
+
+14  Curiously enough, common speech here reverses our use of
+terms, because it looks at the matter from the practical instead of
+from the aesthetic point of view, regarding (very unpsychologically)
+the thought as the source of the image, not the image as the
+source of the thought. People call the words the expression
+of the thought: whereas for the observer, the hearer (and generally
+for the speaker, too), the words are the datum and the thought is
+their expressiveness -- that which they suggest.
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Achilles, 179, 187.
+Aesthetic feeling, its importance, 1.
+     speculation, causes of its neglect, 2.
+     theory, its uses, 6, 7.
+Aesthetics, Use of the word, 15.
+Angels, 55, 182.
+Apperception, 96 _et seq._
+Arabic inscriptions as ornament, 195.
+Architecture, Effects of Gothic, 165, 166.
+     governed by use, 161, 162.
+Aristotelian forms, 156.
+Aristotle, 174, 175, 288.
+Associative process, 198 _et seq._
+Augustine, Saint, quoted, 252.
+
+
+Beauty a value, 14 _et seq._
+     as felt is indescribable, 267, 268.
+     a justification of things, 268, 269.
+     defined, 49 _et seq._
+     verbal definitions quoted, 14.
+Beethoven, 43.
+Breathing related to the sense of beauty, 56.
+Burke, 124, note.
+Byron, quoted, 136.
+Byzantine architecture, 108, 109.
+
+Calderon, 174.
+Centaurs, 183, 256.
+Character as an aesthetic form, 176 _et seq._
+Characters, Ideal, 180 _et seq._
+Charles V.'s palace at the Alhambra, 44.
+Christ, the various ideas of his nature, 189.
+Circle, its aesthetic quality, 89.
+Classicism, French and English, 109.
+Colonnades, 108.
+Colour, 72 _et seq._
+     its analogy to other sensations, 74, 75.
+     possibility of an abstract art of colour, 75.
+Comic, The, 245 _et seq._
+Conscience, its representative character, 33, 34.
+Cost as an element of effect, 211 _et seq._
+Couplet, The, 108.
+Criticism, Use of the word, 15.
+
+Definite and indefinite, meaning of the terms, 138, note.
+Degradation not what pleases in the comic, 247 _et seq._
+Democracy, aesthetics of it, 109
+Descartes, 16, 183.
+Disinterestedness not the differentia of aesthetic pleasure,
+     37 _et seq._
+Don Quixote, 179, 255.
+
+Economy and fitness, 214 _et seq._
+Emerson, 144.
+Epicurean esthetics, 10, 11.
+     sublime, The, 241, 243.
+Escurial, The, 95, 210.
+Ethos, 174, 175.
+Evil, life without it aesthetic, 29, 30.
+     in the second term of expression, 221 _et seq._
+     conventional use of the word, 223.
+     an occasion of the sublime, 235 _et seq._
+     excluded from the beautiful, 260, 261.
+Evolution, its possible tendency to eliminate imagination, 26
+Exclusiveness a sign of aesthetic vigour, 44.
+Experience superior to theory in aesthetics, 11, 12.
+Expression defined, 192 _et seq._
+     of feeling in another, 202, 203.
+     of practical values, 208 _et seq._
+Expressiveness, Use of the word, 197.
+
+Fechner, 97.
+Form, There is a beauty of, 82 _et seq._
+     the unity of a manifold, 95 _et seq._
+Functions of the mind may all contribute to the sense of beauty,
+     53 _et seq._
+
+Geometrical figures, 88 _et seq._
+God, the idea of him in tradition and in metaphysics, 188, 189.
+Gods, development of their ideal characters, 185 _et seq._
+Goethe, 9, 170, 179.
+Grammar, its analogy to metaphysics, 169.
+Gretchen, 179.
+Grotesque, The, 256 _et seq._
+
+Hamlet, 179.
+Happiness and aesthetic interest, 63, 65.
+Health a condition of aesthetic life, 54.
+Hedonism opposed by the moral sense, 23, 24.
+History an imaginative thing, 141, 142.
+Home as a social and as an aesthetic idea, 64.
+Homer, 171.
+     his aesthetic quality, 205, 206.
+     his epithets, 179.
+Horace, quoted, 172.
+Humour, 253 _et seq._
+
+Ideals are modified averages, 121 _et seq._
+     immanent in human nature, 262.
+     stable, 263 _et seq._
+Imagination has a universal creative function, 190, 191.
+     and sense alternately active, 55, 56.
+Impression distinguished from expression, 84, 85.
+Impressionism in painting, 134, 136.
+incongruity not what pleases in the comic, 247 _et seq._
+Indeterminate organizational _et seq._
+Infinite beauty, the idea impossible, 148 _et seq._
+Inspiration, 252, 253.
+
+Kalokagathia, 31.
+Kant, 105.
+Keats, quoted, 67, 105, 181, 264.
+King Lear, 229.
+Kipling, R., quoted, 68.
+
+Landscape, 133 _et seq._
+     with figures, 135, 136.
+Liberation of self, 233 _et seq._
+Love, influence of the passion, 56 _et seq._
+Lowell, J. R., quoted, 148.
+Lower senses, 65 _et seq._
+Lucretius, quoted, 172.
+     on the sublime, 236.
+
+Maps, 209, 210.
+Material beauty most easily appreciated, 78 _et seq._
+     its effect the fundamental one, 78.
+Materials of beauty surveyed, 76 _et seq._
+Methods in aesthetics, 5.
+Michael Angelo, 182.
+Miser's fallacy, its parallel in morals and aesthetics, 31, 32.
+Modern languages inferior to the ancient, 173, 174.
+Molière, 174; quoted, 20.
+Monarchy, its imaginative value, 34, 35.
+Moral and aesthetic values, 23 _et seq._
+     the authority of morals over aesthetics, 218 _et seq._
+Morality and utility jealous of art, 216, 217.
+Multiplicity in uniformity, 97 _et seq._
+     its defects, 106 _et seq._
+Musset, Alfred de, quoted, 170, 226.
+Mysticism in aesthetics, 126 _et seq._
+
+Naturalism, the ground of its value, 21.
+Nature, its organization the source of apperceptive forms,
+     152 _et seq._
+     the love of it among the ancients, 137, 138.
+New York, the plan of the streets, 95.
+Nouns, idea of a language without them, 171.
+
+Objectification the differentia of aesthetic pleasure, 44 _et seq._
+Ornament and form, 63 _et seq._
+Othello, 237.
+Ovid, quoted, 149.
+
+Pantheism, its contradictions, 242, 243.
+Perception, the psychological theory of it, 45 _et seq._
+Perfection, illusion of infinite, 146 _et seq._
+     possibility of finite, 258 _et seq._
+Physical pleasure distinguished from aesthetic, 35 _et seq._
+Physiology of the perception of form, 85 _et seq._
+Picturesqueness contrasted with symmetry, 92.
+Platonic ideas useless in explaining types, 117, 118.
+Platonic intuitions, their nature and value, 8 _et seq._
+Platonists, 159.
+Plot, The, 174 _et seq._
+Preference ultimately irrational, 18 _et seq._
+     necessary to value, 17, 18.
+Principles consecrated aesthetically, 31 _et seq._
+Purity, The aesthetic principle of, 70 _et seq._
+
+Rationality, the source of its value, 19, 20.
+Religious characters, their truth, 188.
+     imagination, 185 _et seq._
+Rhyme, 173, 174.
+Romanticism, 150.
+
+Schopenhauer, 263.
+     criticised, 37,
+     note, on music, 69.
+Scientific attitude in criticism opposed to the aesthetic, 20, 21.
+Sculpture, its development, 153, 154.
+Self not a primary object of interest, 39, 40.
+Sensuous beauty of fundamental importance, 80, 81.
+Sex, its relation to aesthetic life, 56 _et seq._
+Shakespeare, 151, 174, 175;
+     quoted, 51, 114, 229, 237, 251.
+Shelley quoted, 12, 244, 253.
+Sight, its primacy in perception, 73, 74.
+Size related to beauty, 123, 124.
+Sky, The, its expressiveness, 8.
+Social interests and their aesthetic influence, 62 _et seq._
+Socrates, his utilitarian aesthetics, 157.
+Sonnet, The, 173.
+Sound, 68 _et seq._
+Space, its metaphysical value, 66, note.
+Stars, the effect analyzed, 100 _et seq._
+Stendhal, 61.
+Stoic Sublime, The, 241.
+Straight lines, 89, 90.
+Subjectivity of aesthetic values, 3,4.
+Sublime, The, its independence of the expression of evil,
+     239 _et seq._
+Sublimity, 233 _et seq._
+Sybaris, 216.
+Symbolists, 144.
+Symmetry, 91 _et seq._
+     a principle of individuation, 93.
+     limits of its application, 95.
+Syntactical form, 171 _et seq._
+
+Tacitus, 173, 252.
+Terms, the first and second terms in expression defined, 195.
+     influence of the first term in the pleasing expression of evil,
+     226 _et seq._
+Theory a method of apperception, 138 _et seq._
+Tragedy mitigated by beauty of form and the expression of good,
+     228, 229.
+     mitigated by the diversity of evils, 229.
+     mixed with comedy, 224, 225, 228.
+     consists in treatment not in subject, 224.
+Translation necessarily inadequate, 168.
+Truth, grounds of its value, 22, 23.
+Truth, mixture of the expression of truth with that of evil,
+     228 _et seq._
+Types, their origin, 116 _et seq._
+     their value and that of examples, 112 _et seq._
+
+Ugly, The, not a cause of pain, 25.
+Universality not the differentia of aesthetic pleasure, 40 _et seq._
+Utility the principle of organization in nature, 155 _et seq._
+     its relation to beauty, 157 _et seq._
+     the principle of organization in the arts, 160 _et seq._
+
+Value, aesthetic value in the second term of expression, 205 _et
+seq._
+     all in one sense aesthetic, 28 _et seq._
+     physical, practical, and negative transformed into aesthetic,
+     201 _et seq._
+Venus of Milo, 165, note.
+Virgin Mary, The, 189, 190.
+
+Whitman, 112.
+Wit, 250 _et seq._
+Words, 167 _et seq._
+Wordsworth quoted, 105.
+Work and play, 25 _et seq._
+
+Xenophon quoted, 123.
+     his _Symposium,_ 157.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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