Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/26

Take an ascending series of cases. There is the feeling which attends eating when you are very hungry. There is little or nothing in this pleasantness which recalls the characters we emphasised at first, as stable, relevant, and common. You cannot retain the pleasantness as the appetite becomes sated; there is little in it to dwell upon; there is very little to communicate. Tasting a fine wine, when you are not thirsty, has, on the other hand, a good deal in it of the latter kind. In Meredith’s Egoist the praises of wines ascribed to Dr. Middleton are a case in point. He is able to analyse in terms of permanent and general value the different qualities of pleasantness that characterise the different wines. And this takes us beyond the mere feeling of pleasantness, to an object of imagination, with the character of which its peculiarity is blended. The sense of heat and cold, on the other hand, can give hardly anything like this; it has no structure, no pattern, no connection of elements, to reveal. The sense of smell again gives, prima facie,