en either theological passion or practical use. All
we find, for example, written about beauty may be divided into
two groups: that group of writings in which philosophers have
interpreted aesthetic facts in the light of their metaphysical
principles, and made of their theory of taste a corollary or footnote
to their systems; and that group in which artists and critics have
ventured into philosophic ground, by generalizing somewhat the
maxims of the craft or the comments of the sensitive observer. A
treatment of the subject at once direct and theoretic has been very
rare: the problems of nature and morals have attracted the
reasoners, and the description and creation of beauty have
absorbed the artists; between the two reflection upon aesthetic
experience has remained abortive or incoherent.

A circumstance that has also contributed to the absence or to the
failure of aesthetic speculation is the subjectivity of the
phenomenon with which it deals. Man has a prejudice against
himself: anything which is a product of his mind seems to him to
be unreal or comparatively insignificant. We are satisfied
only when we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and laws
independent of our nature. The ancients long speculated about the
constitution of the universe before they became aware of that mind
which is the instrument of all speculation. The moderns, also, even
within the field of psychology, have studied first the function of
perception and the theory of knowledge, by which we seem to be
informed about external things; they have in comparison neglected
the exclusively subjective and human department of imagination
and emotion. We have still to recognize in practice the truth that
from these despised feelings of ours the great world of perception
derives all its value, if not also its existence. Things are interesting
because we care about them, and important because we need them.
Had our perceptions no connexion with our pleasures, we should
soon close our eyes on this world; if our intelligence were of no
service to our passions, we should come to doubt, in the lazy
freedom of reverie, whether two and two make four.

Yet so strong is the popular sense of the unworthiness and
insignificance of things purely emotional, that those who have
taken moral problems to heart and felt their dignity have often
been led into attempts to discover some external right and beauty
of which, our moral and aesthetic feelings should be percept