The Principles of Aesthetics | Page 2

the life which they lead so
admirably, so in the world of beauty, the men who do and appreciate
are not always the ones who understand.
Very often, moreover, the artist and the art lover justify their inability
to understand beauty on the ground that beauty is too subtle a thing for
thought. How, they say, can one hope to distill into clear and stable
ideas such a vaporous and fleeting matter as Aesthetic feeling? Such
men are not only unable to think about beauty, but skeptical as to the
possibility of doing so,--contented mystics, deeply feeling, but dumb.
However, there have always been artists and connoisseurs who have
striven to reflect upon their appreciations and acts, unhappy until they
have understood and justified what they were doing; and one meets
with numerous art-loving people whose intellectual curiosity is rather
quickened than put to sleep by just that element of elusiveness in
beauty upon which the mystics dwell. Long acquaintance with any

class of objects leads naturally to the formation of some definition or
general idea of them, and the repeated performance of the same type of
act impels to the search for a principle that can be communicated to
other people in justification of what one is doing and in defense of the
value which one attaches to it. Thoughtful people cannot long avoid
trying to formulate the relation of their interest in beauty, which
absorbs so much energy and devotion, to other human interests, to fix
its place in the scheme of life. It would be surprising, therefore, if there
had been no Shelleys or Sidneys to define the relation between poetry
and science, or Tolstoys to speculate on the nature of all art; and we
should wonder if we did not everywhere hear intelligent people
discussing the relation of utility and goodness to beauty, or asking what
makes a poem or a picture great.
Now the science of aesthetics is an attempt to do in a systematic way
what thoughtful art lovers have thus always been doing haphazardly. It
is an effort to obtain a clear general idea of beautiful objects, our
judgments upon them, and the motives underlying the acts which create
them,--to raise the aesthetic life, otherwise a matter of instinct and
feeling, to the level of intelligence, of understanding. To understand art
means to find an idea or definition which applies to it and to no other
activity, and at the same time to determine its relation to other elements
of human nature; and our understanding will be complete if our idea
includes all the distinguishing characteristics of art, not simply
enumerated, but exhibited in their achieved relations.
How shall we proceed in seeking such an idea of art? We must follow a
twofold method: first, the ordinary scientific method of observation,
analysis, and experiment; and second, another and very different
method, which people of the present day often profess to avoid, but
which is equally necessary, as I shall try to show, and actually
employed by those who reject it. In following the first method we treat
beautiful things as objects given to us for study, much as plants and
animals are given to the biologist. Just as the biologist watches the
behavior of his specimens, analyzes them into their various parts and
functions, and controls his studies through carefully devised
experiments, arriving at last at a clear notion of what a plant or an

animal is--at a definition of life; so the student of aesthetics observes
works of art and other well-recognized beautiful things, analyzes their
elements and the forms of connection of these, arranges experiments to
facilitate and guard his observations from error and, as a result, reaches
the general idea for which he is looking,--the idea of beauty.
A vast material presents itself for study of this kind: the artistic
attempts of children and primitive men; the well-developed art of
civilized nations, past and present, as creative process and as completed
work; and finally, the everyday aesthetic appreciations of nature and
human life, both by ourselves and by the people whom we seek out for
study. Each kind of material has its special value. The first has the
advantage of the perspicuity which comes from simplicity, similar for
our purposes to the value of the rudimentary forms of life for the
biologist. But this advantage of early art may be overestimated; for the
nature of beauty is better revealed in its maturer manifestations, even as
the purposes of an individual are more fully, if not more clearly,
embodied in maturity than in youth or childhood.
Yet a purely objective method will not suffice to give us an adequate
idea of beauty. For beautiful things are created by men, not passively
discovered, and are made, like other things which men make, in order