are not thus definitely imaginable. They are diffuse and abstract,
and verbal rather than sensuous in their materials. Therefore the
great emotions that go with them are not immediately transmutable
into beauty. If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because
happiness does not interest them. They cannot seriously pursue it,
because its components are not components of beauty, and being in
love with beauty, they neglect and despise those unaesthetic social
virtues in the operation of which happiness is found. On the other
hand those who pursue happiness conceived merely in the abstract
and conventional terms, as money, success, or respectability, often
miss that real and fundamental part of happiness which flows from
the senses and imagination. This element is what aesthetics
supplies to life; for beauty also can be a cause and a factor of
happiness. Yet the happiness of loving beauty is either too
sensuous to be stable, or else too ultimate, too sacramental, to be
accounted happiness by the worldly mind.

_The lower senses._

Sec. 15. The senses of touch, taste, and smell, although capable no
doubt of a great development, have not served in man for the
purposes of intelligence so much as those of sight and hearing. It is
natural that as they remain normally in the background of
consciousness, and furnish the least part of our objectified ideas,
the pleasures connected with them should remain also detached,
and unused for the purpose of appreciation of nature. They have
been called the unaesthetic, as well as the lower, senses; but the
propriety of these epithets, which is undeniable, is due not to any
intrinsic sensuality or baseness of these senses, but to the function
which they happen to have in our experience. Smell and taste, like
hearing, have the great disadvantage of not being intrinsically
spatial: they are therefore not fitted to serve for the representation
of nature, which allows herself to be accurately conceived only in
spatial terms.[3] They have not reached, moreover, the same
organization as sounds, and therefore cannot furnish any play of
subjective sensation comparable to music in interest.

The objectification of musical forms is due to their fixity and
complexity: like words, they are thought of as existing in a social
medium, and can be beautiful without being spatial. But tastes
have never been so accurately or universally classified and
distinguished; the instrument of sensation