Page:Philosophical Review Volume 12.djvu/18

2 list, but rather to indicate categories which have been generally and widely recognized as distinguishing the æsthetic from other values such as the ethical, logical, or economic, or from other pleasures such as the agreeable. And, amid the seeming multiplicity of such marks or differentia which have been put forth by writers on aesthetics, there is after all a considerable degree of uniformity. These may be grouped under three heads:

I. The æsthetic judgment (a) expresses a value and hence implies a subjective element; but (b) this value is not apprehended as subjective, private, and relative, but rather as objective, independent of personal states or conditions, and hence as appealing actually or nominally to others.

This characteristic has been described in various terms. Volkelt denotes it as a fusion of feeling and contemplation (Schauen), or the association of an element besides sense impression, or the unity of form and content corresponding to percept and feeling respectively. Santayana regards it as "objectivity," or "pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing." Home uses the phrase "spread upon the object." Kant employs the terms universality and necessity. By universality he has sometimes been supposed to mean that all agree in their aesthetic judgments. This is analogous to supposing that when Kant asserts the universality of a priori judgments in pure physics he means that a savage and a Newton would agree on the causes of eclipses. Kant means rather that the judgment 'This is beautiful,' as contrasted with the judgment 'This pleases me,' implies an elimination of the subjective attitude, such as is involved in the judgment 'This body is heavy,' as contrasted with the statement ' If I carry this body, I feel the pressure of its weight.' That such is the correct interpretation, and that by universality Kant is giving in the terms of the critical philosophy the equivalent of Santayana's objectivity, is evident from Kant's own words: "He will speak of the beautiful as though beauty were a quality of the object." Cohn would avoid the misunderstanding to