rsons with extremely high aesthetic sensibilities
are at such a discount in practical life. They are too easily
dissolved in appreciation. They are too much absorbed, for
practical efficiency, in the tragic, the whimsical, the beautiful,
or the comic aspects of men and affairs. The same sensitivity
to the innuendoes and colors of life that enable some of
such men to give an exquisite and various portraiture of
experience, incapacitates them for action. The practical man
must not observe anything irrelevant to his immediate business.
He must not be dissolved, at every random provocation,
into ecstacy, laughter, or sorrow. There is too much to
be done in business, government, mechanics, and the laboratory,
to allow one's attention to wander dreamingly over the
tragic, the beautiful, the pathetic, the comic, and the
grotesque qualities of the day's work. To take an extreme case,
it would, as Jane Harrison observes, be a monstrosity, when
our friend was drowning, to note with lingering appreciation
the fluent white curve of his arm in the glimmering waters of
the late afternoon. The man to whom every event is flooded
with imaginative possibilities and emotional suggestions is a
useless or a dangerous character in situations where it is
essential to discriminate the immediate and important bearings
of facts. We cannot select an expert accountant on the
basis of a pleasant smile, nor a chauffeur for his sense of
humor.

But while, in the larger part of the lives of most men, observation
of facts is controlled with reference to their practical
bearings, observation may sometimes take place for its own
sake. The glory of a sunset is not commonly prized for any
good that may come of it; nobody but a general on a campaign
or a fire warden looks out from a mountain peak upon
the valley below for reasons other than the pleasure of the
beholding. In the case of persons, also, we are not always
interested in them for their uses; we are sometimes delighted
with them in themselves. We pause to watch merry or
quaint children, experts at tennis, beautiful faces, for their
own sakes.

While even in nature and in social experience, we thus sometimes
note specifically aesthetic values, the objects of fine art
have no other justification than the immediate satisfactions
they produce in their beholder. Those intrinsic pleasures
which go by the general name of beauty are various and
complicated. Our joy may be in the sheer delight of th