I purpose at present to speak only of four of the more current opinions
respecting beauty, for of the errors connected with the pleasurableness
of proportion, and of the expression of right feelings in the
countenance, I shall have opportunity to treat in the succeeding
chapters; (compare Ch. VI. Ch. XVI.)

Those erring or inconsistent positions which I would at once dismiss
are, the first, that the beautiful is the true, the second, that the
beautiful is the useful, the third, that it is dependent on custom, and
the fourth, that it is dependent on the association of ideas.

To assert that the beautiful is the true, appears, at first, like
asserting that propositions are matter, and matter propositions. But
giving the best and most rational interpretation we can, and supposing
the holders of this strange position to mean only that things are
beautiful which appear what they indeed are, and ugly which appear what
they are not, we find them instantly contradicted by each and every
conclusion of experience. A stone looks as truly a stone as a rose looks
a rose, and yet is not so beautiful; a cloud may look more like a castle
than a cloud, and be the more beautiful on that account. The mirage of
the desert is fairer than its sands; the false image of the under heaven
fairer than the sea. I am at a loss to know how any so untenable a
position could ever have been advanced; but it may, perhaps, have arisen
from some confusion of the beauty of art with the beauty of nature, and
from an illogical expansion of the very certain truth, that nothing is
beautiful in art, which, professing to be an imitation, or a statement,
is not as such in some sort true.

Sec. 2. Of the false opinion that beauty is usefulness. Compare Chap. xii.
Sec. 5.

That the beautiful is the useful, is an assertion evidently based on
that limited and false sense of the latter term which I have already
deprecated. As it is the most degrading and dangerous supposition which
can be advanced on the subject, so, fortunately, it is the most
palpably absurd. It is to confound admiration with hunger, love with
lust, and life with sensation; it is to assert that the human creature
has no ideas and no feelings, except those ultimately referable to its
brutal appetites. It has not a single fact nor appearance of fact to
support it, and needs no combating, at least until its advocates have
obtained the consent of the majority of mankind, that the most bea