ions or
discoveries, just as our intellectual activity is, in men's opinion, a
perception or discovery of external fact. These philosophers seem
to feel that unless moral and aesthetic judgments are expressions of
objective truth, and not merely expressions of human nature, they
stand condemned of hopeless triviality. A judgment is not trivial,
however, because it rests on human feelings; on the contrary,
triviality consists in abstraction from human interests; only those
judgments and opinions are truly insignificant which wander
beyond the reach of verification, and have no function in the
ordering and enriching of life.

Both ethics and aesthetics have suffered much from the prejudice
against the subjective. They have not suffered more because both
have a subject-matter which is partly objective. Ethics deals with
conduct as much as with emotion, and therefore considers the
causes of events and their consequences as well as our judgments
of their value. Esthetics also is apt to include the history and
philosophy of art, and to add much descriptive and critical matter
to the theory of our susceptibility to beauty. A certain confusion is
thereby introduced into these inquiries, but at the same time the
discussion is enlivened by excursions into neighbouring provinces,
perhaps more interesting to the general reader.

We may, however, distinguish three distinct elements of ethics and
aesthetics, and three different ways of approaching the subject. The
first is the exercise of the moral or aesthetic faculty itself, the
actual pronouncing of judgment and giving of praise, blame, and
precept. This is not a matter of science but of character, enthusiasm,
niceness of perception, and fineness of emotion. It is aesthetic or
moral activity, while ethics and aesthetics, as sciences, are
intellectual activities, having that aesthetic or moral activity for
their subject-matter.

The second method consists in the historical explanation of
conduct or of art as a part of anthropology, and seeks to discover
the conditions of various types of character, forms of polity,
conceptions of justice, and schools of criticism and of art. Of this
nature is a great deal of what has been written on aesthetics. The
philosophy of art has often proved a more tempting subject than
the psychology of taste, especially to minds which were not so
much fascinated by beauty itself as by the curious problem of the
artistic instinct in man and of the div