rience on which it is based. That is,
after all, the use of theory. If when a theory is bad it narrows our
capacity for observation and makes all appreciation vicarious and
formal, when it is good it reacts favourably upon our powers,
guides the attention to what is really capable of affording
entertainment, and increases, by force of new analogies, the range
of our interests. Speculation is an evil if it imposes a foreign
organization on our mental life; it is a good if it only brings to light,
and makes more perfect by training, the organization already
inherent in it.

We shall therefore study human sensibility itself and our actual
feelings about beauty, and we shall look for no deeper,
unconscious causes of our aesthetic consciousness. Such value as
belongs to metaphysical derivations of the nature of the beautiful,
comes to them not because they explain our primary feelings,
which they cannot do, but because they express, and in fact
constitute, some of our later appreciations. There is no explanation,
for instance, in calling beauty an adumbration of divine attributes.
Such a relation, if it were actual, would not help us at all to
understand why the symbols of divinity pleased. But in certain
moments of contemplation, when much emotional experience lies
behind us, and we have reached very general ideas both of nature
and of life, our delight in any particular object may consist in
nothing but the thought that this object is a manifestation of
universal principles. The blue sky may come to please chiefly
because it seems the image of a serene conscience, or of the eternal
youth and purity of nature after a thousand partial corruptions. But
this expressiveness of the sky is due to certain qualities of the
sensation, which bind it to all things happy and pure, and, in a
mind in which the essence of purity and happiness is embodied in
an idea of God, bind it also to that idea.

So it may happen that the most arbitrary and unreal theories, which
must be rejected as general explanations of aesthetic life, may be
reinstated as particular moments of it. Those intuitions which we
call Platonic are seldom scientific, they seldom explain the
phenomena or hit upon the actual law of things, but they are often
the highest expression of that activity which they fail to make
comprehensible. The adoring lover cannot understand the natural
history of love; for he is all in all at the last and supreme stage of
its development.