o assume here is that there are certain aspects of
external things, certain relations of form, together with a power of
exciting certain pleasurable ideas in the spectator's mind, which are
commonly recognized as the cause of the emotion of beauty, and indeed
regarded as constituting the embodiments of the objective quality,
beauty. AEsthetic intuition thus clearly implies the immediate assurance
of the existence of a common source of aesthetic delight, a source bound
up with an object of common sense-perception. And so we may say that to
call a thing beautiful is more or less distinctly to recognize it as a
cause of a present emotion, and to attribute to it a power of raising a
kindred emotion in other minds.

_AEsthetic Illusion._

According to this view of the matter, an illusion of aesthetic intuition
would arise whenever this power of affecting a number of minds
pleasurably is wrongly attributed, by an act of "intuition," to an
object of sense-perception, on the ground of a present personal
feeling.

Now, this error is by no means unfrequent. Our delight in viewing
external things, though agreeing up to a certain point, does not agree
throughout. It is a trite remark that there is a large individual
factor, a considerable "personal equation," in matters of taste, as in
other matters. Permanent differences of natural sensibility, of
experience, of intellectual habits, and so on, make an object
aesthetically impressive and valuable to one man and not to another. Yet
these differences tend to be overlooked. The individual mind, filled
with delight at some spectacle, automatically projects its feeling
outwards in the shape of a cause of a common sentiment. And the force of
this impulse cannot be altogether explained as the effect of past
experiences and of association. It seems to involve, in addition, the
play of social instincts, the impulse of the individual mind to connect
itself in sympathy with the collective mind.

Here, as in the other varieties of illusion already treated of, we may
distinguish between a passive and an active side; only in this case the
passive side must not be taken as corresponding to any common
suggestions of the object, as in the case of perception proper. So far
as an illusion of aesthetic intuition may be considered as passive, it
must be due to the effect of circumscribed individual associations with
the object.

All agree that what is called beauty consists, to a considerable e