d 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
toward another; makes it one of the dearest enjoyments 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.... To a certain extent this kind of
interest will center in the proper object of sexual passion, and
in the special characteristics of the opposite sex[131]; 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.... Passion then overflows and visibly floods those
neighboring 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." (G. Santayana, _The Sense of Beauty_, pp. 59-62.)

Not only is the general fact of sexual attraction an essential
element of aesthetic contemplation, as Santayana remarks, but we
have to