Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/11



all the scientific terms in common use, perhaps no one conveys to the mind a more vague and indeterminable sense than this, at the same time that the user is always conscious of a meaning and appropriateness; so that he is in the position of one who endeavors to convey his sense of the real presence of an idea, which still he cannot himself fully grasp and account for.

We have adopted this vague, this comprehensive, but undefined word, in our titlepage; thereby rendering ourselves responsible for some account, however incomplete, of that which it stands for to us.

We should render little assistance by referring the reader to Dictionary or Encyclopedia. He might there find, that the word æsthetics implies a &quot;philosophy of poetry and the fine arts:&quot; but he that has used the word but twice perceives, that it is more than this; that, like carbon or oxygen, it is an element that encounters his inquiry in the most unexpected forms; that what he took for simple substances, as air or water, are chemical combinations, into which his new element largely enters, and which cannot exist without it.

The &quot;æsthetic element,&quot; then, is in our view neither a theory of the beautiful, nor a philosophy of art, but a component and indivisible part in all human creations which are not mere works of necessity; in other words, which are based on idea, as distinguished from appetite.