on,
is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical
language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.

This definition is intended to sum up a variety of distinctions and
identifications which should perhaps be here more explicitly set
down. Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of
fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional
and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give
pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever
indifferent is a contradiction in terms.

In the second place this value is positive, it is the sense of the
presence of something good, or (in the case of ugliness) of its
absence. It is never the perception of a positive evil, it is never a
negative value. That we are endowed with the sense of beauty is a
pure gain which brings no evil with it. When the ugly ceases to be
amusing or merely uninteresting and becomes disgusting, it
becomes indeed a positive evil: but a moral and practical, not an
aesthetic one. In aesthetics that saying is true -- often so
disingenuous in ethics -- that evil is nothing but the absence of
good: for even the tedium and vulgarity of an existence without
beauty is not itself ugly so much as lamentable and degrading. The
absence of aesthetic goods is a moral evil: the aesthetic evil is
merely relative, and means less of aesthetic good than was
expected at the place and time. No form in itself gives pain,
although some forms give pain by causing a shock of surprise even
when they are really beautiful: as if a mother found a fine bull pup
in her child's cradle, when her pain would not be aesthetic in its
nature.

Further, this pleasure must not be in the consequence of the utility
of the object or event, but in its immediate perception; in other
words, beauty is an ultimate good, something that gives
satisfaction to a natural function, to some fundamental need or
capacity of our minds. Beauty is therefore a positive value that is
intrinsic; it is a pleasure. These two circumstances sufficiently
separate the sphere of aesthetics from that of ethics. Moral values
are generally negative, and always remote. Morality has to do with
the avoidance of evil and the pursuit of good: aesthetics only with
enjoyment.

Finally, the pleasures of sense are distinguished from the
perception of beauty, as sensation in general is distinguished from
perception; by the obje