either can be found in a degree of supremacy which practically renders the co-operation of the other unimportant. The two buildings cited above, two human faces, two musical compositions, may exhibit in an impressive and engrossing way the beauty of form and of expression respectively. Nor is this all. Beauty refuses to be confined even to these two. There are the various beauties of colour, for example, as exhibited in such familiar phenomena of nature as sea Three ultimate modes of beauty. and sky, autumn moors and woods. A slight analysis of the constituents of objects to which we attribute beauty shows that there are at least three distinct modes of this attribute, namely (1) sensuous beauty, (2) beauty of form and (3) beauty of meaning or expression, nor do these appear to be reducible to any higher or more comprehensive principle. It requires a certain boldness to attempt to effect a rapprochement between the formal and the expressional factor.[1] An apparent unification of the three seems at present only possible by substituting for beauty another concept at least equally vague, such as perfection,[2] which seems to imply the idea of purposiveness, and to apply clearly only to certain domains of beauty, e.g. organic form.
We may now take another step and say that beauty appears to be a quality in objects which is not sharply differentiated from other and allied qualities. If we look at the usages of speech we shall find that beauty has its kindred conceptions, such as gracefulness, prettiness Beauty and allied conceptions.and others. Writers on aesthetics have spent much time on these “Modifications of the Beautiful.” The point emphasized here is the difficulty of drawing the line between them. Even an expert may hesitate long before saying whether a human face, a flower or a cameo should be called beautiful or pretty. Must we postulate as many allied qualities as there are names for these pleasing aspects of objects? Or must we do violence to usage and so stretch the word “Beauty” as to make it cover all qualities or aspects of objects which have aesthetic value, including those “modifications of the beautiful” which we know as the sublime, the comic and the rest? But the wider we try in this way to make the denotation of the term the vaguer grows the connotation. We are thus left equally incapable of saying what the quality is, and in which aspect or attribute of the object it inheres.[3]
It seems to follow that in constructing a scientific theory we do well to dispense with the assumption of an objective quality of beauty. Aesthetics will return to Kant and confine itself to the examination of objects called beautiful in their relation to, and in their manner of affecting Assumption of objective quality of beauty dispensed with.
Aesthetic qualities.our minds.[4] The aesthetic value of such an object will be viewed as consisting in the possession of certain assignable characteristics by means of which it is fitted to affect us in a certain desirable way, to draw us into the enjoyable mood of aesthetic contemplation. These characteristics may conveniently be called aesthetic qualities.[5] Objects which are found to possess one or more of these qualities in the required degree of fulness claim a certain aesthetic value, even though they fall short of being “beautiful,” in the more exacting use of this word. They are in the direction—“im Sinne,” as Fechner says—of beauty, conceived as something fuller and richer, answering to a higher standard of aesthetic enjoyment and a severer demand on our part. The word “beauty” may still be used occasionally, where no ambiguity arises, as a convenient expression for aesthetic value in all its degrees. Yet it is better to keep the term applicable to the objects commonly denoted by it by making it represent the fuller aesthetic satisfactions which flow from a rare and commanding exhibition of one or more of these qualities, from what may be described as an appreciable excellence of aesthetic quality.
By thus dispensing with the concept of beauty as some occult undefinable quality, we get rid of much of the contradiction which appears to inhere in our aesthetic experience. For example, a bit of brilliant colour in a bonnet which pleases the wearer but offends her superior in aesthetic matters takes its place as something which per se has a certain degree of aesthetic value even though the particular relations into which it has now thrust itself, palpable to the trained eye, may practically rob it of its value. In thus substituting the relative idea of aesthetic value for the absolute idea of beauty we may no doubt seem to be destroying the reality of the object of aesthetic perception. This point may more conveniently be taken up later when we consider the whole question of aesthetic illusion.
This new way of envisaging aesthetic objects requires us to make the study of their effect a prominent part of our investigation. In all the valuable recent work on the subject, attention has been largely concentrated on this effect. More particularly we have to investigate and illumine Problem of
aesthetic effect.
Aesthetics and
laws of pleasure.
Problem of aesthetic enjoyment a special one.
The attitude of aesthetic contemplation. scientifically the pleasurable side of the experience. In doing this we shall make use of all the light we can obtain from a study of known laws of Pleasure. Thus we shall avail ourselves not only of the theory of the pleasure-tones of sensation but of that of the conditions of an agreeable exercise of the attention upon objects more particularly of the characteristics of objects which adequately stimulate the attention without confusing or burdening it. Yet this does not require that we should treat the aesthetic problem as a part of the more general science of pleasure, as has been attempted by some, e.g. Grant Allen (Physiological Aesthetics) and Rutgers Marshall (Pain, Pleasure and Aesthetics, and Aesthetic Principles.) To do so would be to run the risk of considering only the more general aspects and conditions of aesthetic enjoyment, whereas what we need is a theory of it as a specific kind of pleasurable experience. What is required at the present stage of development of the science is a deeper investigation of the aesthetic attitude of mind as a whole, of what we may call the aesthetic psychosis. We need to probe the act of contemplation itself, the mode of activity of attention involved in this calm, half-dreamlike gazing on the mere look of things unconcerned with their ordinary and weightier imports. We need further to determine the effect of this contemplative attitude upon the several mental processes involved, the act of perception itself, with its grasp of manifold relations, the flow of ideas, the partial resurgence and transformation of emotion. In examining these effects we must keep in view the double side of the contemplative attitude, the wide range of free movement which perception and imagination claim and enjoy, and the willing subjection of the contemplative mind to the spell of the object. A deeper inspection of the contemplative mood may be expected to render clearer the difference between the mental activity employed in aesthetic perception and imagination and intellectual activity proper; between. say, the differencing of allied tints involved in the finer aesthetic enjoyment of colour and the sharper, clearer discrimination of tints required in scientific observation, and between such a grasp of relations as is required for a just appreciation of beautiful form and that severe analysis and measurement of formal elements and Intellectual and aesthetic activity further differentiated.their relations which is insisted upon by science. As a result of a finer distinction here we may probably be in a better position to determine the point—touched on more than once in recent works on aesthetics—how far intellectual pleasure proper, e.g. that of recognizing and classifying objects, enters as a subordinate element into aesthetic enjoyment.
- ↑ For example, that hinted at by Bosanquet in his definition of the beautiful, History of aesthetic, p. 5.
- ↑ Beauty is defined as perfection by P. Souriau, La Beauté rationnelle, 2ème partie.
- ↑ K. Groos argues well against this violent stretching of the word beautiful, Einleitung in die Ästhetik, pp. 46 seq.
- ↑ Kant, in developing his idea of beauty as subjective, was probably influenced by Hume, who wrote: “Beauty is no quality in things themselves; it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them” (Essays, xxii.).
- ↑ On the nature of these qualities see S. Witasek, Grundzüge der allgem. Ästhetik, p. 11.
