Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/576

 560 CKITICAL NOTICES : aesthetic activity, pass the aesthetic judgment ; we may explain art historically, as a departnrent of anthropology ; or we may employ the psychological method, and inquire into the origin and condi- tions of the aesthetic judgment and sentiment as facts of conscious- ness. It is the latter task which the author has set himself in The Sense of Beauty. A poet and essayist of no small merit, he has- here laid aside construction for theory ; and though his preface modestly declares that the book " simply puts together the scattered commonplaces of criticism into a system, under the inspiration of a naturalistic psychology," the theory shows much of originality, and sets many of the accepted canons in a new and clearer light. The answer that Dr. Santayana returns to the vexed question of the nature of beauty is, put briefly (I shall recur to the definition later on), that it is objectified emotion. And from the psycho- logical point of view this is, probably, the most satisfactory answer that can be found. The statement is true enough, as the author means it at the end of his inquiry, that "if we look at things teleologically . . . beauty is of all things what least calls for explanation ". But it is equally true that the psychologist, at the beginning of his investigation, cannot be satisfied till he has found a survival sanction for the aesthetic as for the moral, religious- and intellectual sentiments. To refer beauty to the ' personifying apperception ' is to connect aesthetics in the most intimate manner with religion, and thus to give it one of the strongest possible sanctions ; while it would seem, too, that the psychology which attaches the play sanction to aesthetic activity only after the humanising of nature has been accomplished is sounder than that which derives the aesthetic attitude directly from an ultimate play impulse. The differentia of aesthetic pleasure, then, is its objectifi- cation. Furthermore, beauty, by the fact that it is objectified emotion, becomes a value ; and as a value possesses two distinguish- ing marks. It is positive, never the perception of a real evil ; and it is intrinsic, never the result of the utility of object or event. " These two circumstances sufficiently separate the sphere of aesthetics from that of ethics." It may be added that neither attribute presents any psychological difficulty. Having thus defined beauty, the author proceeds to discuss it under the three headings of materials, form and expression. Any sensation process that can enter into an emotion can also, of course, form part of objectified emotion, i.e., furnish an ingredient of beauty. But psychology has come to lay greater and greater stress upon the organic sensations as factors in the emotive consciousness. Dr. Santayana accordingly begins his account of aesthetic material by reference to the obscure psychoses that accompany the discharge of organic function within the body, such as compose, e.g., the 'general feeling' of bodily health. Of the more definite organic sensations, those that constitute the sexual instinct are of especial aesthetic value. Less important are the