ecause, perhaps, the ultimate nature of
things is as truly exemplified in one thing as in another, we should,
in fact, have abolished taste altogether. For the ascending series of
aesthetic satisfactions we should have substituted a monotonous
judgment of identity. If things are beautiful not by virtue of their
differences but by virtue of an identical something which they
equally contain, then there could be no discrimination in beauty.
Like substance, beauty would be everywhere one and the same,
and any tendency to prefer one thing to another would be a proof
of finitude and illusion. When we try to make our judgments
absolute, what we do is to surrender our natural standards and
categories, and slip into another genus, until we lose ourselves in
the satisfying vagueness of mere being.

Relativity to our partial nature is therefore essential to all our
definite thoughts, judgments, and feelings. And when once the
human bias is admitted as a legitimate, because for us a necessary,
basis of preference, the whole wealth of nature is at once organized
by that standard into a hierarchy of values. Everything is beautiful
because everything is capable in some degree of interesting and
charming our attention; but things differ immensely in this
capacity to please us in the contemplation of them, and therefore
they differ immensely in beauty. Could our nature be fixed and
determined once for all in every particular, the scale of aesthetic
values would become certain. We should not dispute about tastes,
no longer because a common principle of preference could not be
discovered, but rather because any disagreement would then be
impossible.

As a matter of fact, however, human nature is a vague abstraction;
that which is common to all men is the least part of their natural
endowment. Aesthetic capacity is accordingly very unevenly
distributed; and the world of beauty is much vaster and more
complex to one man than to another. So long, indeed, as the
distinction is merely one of development, so that we recognize in
the greatest connoisseur only the refinement of the judgments of
the rudest peasant, our aesthetic principle has not changed; we
might say that, in so far, we had a common standard more or less
widely applied. We might say so, because that standard would be
an implication of a common nature more or less fully developed.

But men do not differ only in the degree of their susceptibility,
they differ also in its direc