From this truth it follows that the condition of aesthetic enjoyment,
or in other words the appreciation of beauty, is detachment of spirit
and remoteness from practical consequences. The classic illustration
of the truth is the saying of Lucretius, that it is sublime to stand on
the shore and behold a shipwreck. It is sublime only as one's
personal interests and feelings are not engaged. It would not be
sublime if it were possible for the spectator to aid in averting the
catastrophe; it would not be sublime if one's friends were aboard the
ship. One is able to appreciate beauty only as one is able to detach
one's self from what is immediate and practical, and by virtue of this
detachment, to apprehend the spiritual significance. The sublimity of
the shipwreck lies in what it expresses of the impersonal might of
elemental forces and man's impotence in the struggle against nature.
That sublimity, which is one manifestation of beauty, is of the spirit,
and by the spirit it must be apprehended.

To illustrate this truth by a few homely examples. A farmer looking
out on his fields of tossing wheat, drenched in golden sunlight,
exclaims, "Look, isn't that beautiful!" What he really means is: "See
there the promise of a rich harvest, and it is mine." If the fields
belonged to his neighbor, his feelings towards them would be quite
different. No, their _beauty_ is to be seen and felt only by him
whose mind is free of thoughts of personal enrichment and who thus
can perceive the harmony with life of golden sunshine and nature's
abundant gifts. The farmer could not see beyond the material and its
value to him as material. But beauty lies deeper than that, for it is
the expression of spiritual relations.

Two men are riding together in a railway carriage. As the train
draws into a city, they pass a little group of tumble-down houses,
brown and gray, a heap of corners thrown together. One man thinks:
"What dreary lives these people must lead who dwell there." The
other, with no such stirring of the sympathy, sees a wonderful
"scheme" in grays and browns, or an expressive composition or
ordering of line. Neither could think the thoughts of the other at the
same time with his own. One feels a practical and physical reaction,
and he cannot therefore at that moment penetrate to the meaning of
these things for the spirit; and that meaning is the harmony which
they express.

From the tangle of daily living with its conflict of interes