a beautiful woman with those of a satyr. The difference lies,
it is urged, in the impersonality of the enjoyment. But this
distinction is one of intensity and delicacy, not of nature, and it
seems satisfactory only to the least aesthetic minds.[1]

In the second place, the supposed disinterestedness of aesthetic
delights is not truly fundamental. Appreciation of a picture is not
identical with the desire to buy it, but it is, or ought to be, closely
related and preliminary to that desire. The beauties of nature and of
the plastic arts are not consumed by being enjoyed; they retain all
the efficacy to impress a second beholder. But this circumstance is
accidental, and those aesthetic objects which depend upon change
and are exhausted in time, as are all performances, are things the
enjoyment of which is an object of rivalry and is coveted as much
as any other pleasure. And even plastic beauties can often not be
enjoyed except by a few, on account of the necessity of travel or
other difficulties of access, and then this aesthetic enjoyment is as
selfishly pursued as the rest.

The truth which the theory is trying to state seems rather to be that
when we seek aesthetic pleasures we have no further pleasure in
mind; that we do not mix up the satisfactions of vanity and
proprietorship with the delight of contemplation. This is true, but it
is true at bottom of all pursuits and enjoyments. Every real
pleasure is in one sense disinterested. It is not sought with ulterior
motives, and what fills the mind is no calculation, but the image of
an object or event, suffused with emotion. A sophisticated
consciousness may often take the idea of self as the touchstone of
its inclinations; but this self, for the gratification and
aggrandizement of which a man may live, is itself only a complex
of aims and memories, which once had their direct objects, in
which he had taken a spontaneous and unselfish interest. The
gratifications which, merged together, make the selfishness are
each of them ingenuous, and no more selfish than the most
altruistic, impersonal emotion. The content of selfishness is a mass
of unselfishness. There is no reference to the nominal essence
called oneself either in one's appetites or in one's natural affections;
yet a man absorbed in his meat and drink, in his houses and lands,
in his children and dogs, is called selfish because these interests,
although natural and instinctive in him, are not shared by others.