d conscience is incapable of regarding as good a state
which excludes its own acrid satisfactions. So, too, a fanatical
imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as
infinitely cruel. The purpose of education is, of course, to free us
from these prejudices, and to develope our ideals in the direction of
the greatest possible good. Evidently the ideal has been formed by
the habit of perception; it is, in a rough way, that average form
which we expect and most readily apperceive. The propriety and
necessity of it is entirely relative to our experience and faculty of
apperception. The shock of surprise, the incongruity with the
formed percept, is the essence and measure of ugliness.

_The average modified in the direction of pleasure._

Sec. 30. Nevertheless we do not form aesthetic ideals any more than
other general types, entirely without bias. We have already
observed that a percept seldom gives an impartial compound of the
objects of which it is the generic image. This partiality is due to a
variety of circumstances. One is the unequal accuracy of our
observation. If some interest directs our attention to a particular
quality of objects, that quality will be prominent in our percept; it
may even be the only content clearly given in our general idea; and
any object, however similar in other respects to those of the given
class, will at once be distinguished as belonging to a different
species if it lacks that characteristic on which our attention is
particularly fixed. Our percepts are thus habitually biassed in the
direction of practical interest, if practical interest does not indeed
entirely govern their formation. In the same manner, our aesthetic
ideals are biassed in the direction of aesthetic interest. Not all parts
of an object are equally congruous with our perceptive faculty; not
all elements are noted with the same pleasure. Those, therefore,
which are agreeable are chiefly dwelt upon by the lover of beauty,
and his percept will give an average of things with a great
emphasis laid on that part of them which is beautiful. The ideal
will thus deviate from the average in the direction of the observer's
pleasure.

For this reason the world is so much more beautiful to a poet or an
artist than to an ordinary man. Each object, as his aesthetic sense is
developed, is perhaps less beautiful than to the uncritical eye; his
taste becomes difficult, and only the very best gives him unalloyed
sati