Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/23

7 speaks of the beauty of a picture, a statue, a work of architecture, a poem, a symphony; then the word 'beauty' must be used to describe a certain special mental state which is aroused in different people by very diverse objective impressions.

This view is strengthened when we consider that the application of the term by individuals changes as they develop naturally, or by processes of education; and that the standards of beauty alter in like manner in a race, from generation to generation, as it advances in its development. We must then look for the essence of beauty in some quality of our mental states which is called up by different objective impressions in different people, and under diverse conditions by different objects at different times in the same individual.

Search for such a quality has led not a few psychologists to look to pleasure as the quality of our mental states which is most likely to meet our demand. It is true that the consideration of pleasure as of the essence of the sense of beauty has not often been seriously carried out, apparently because so many of what we speak of as our most vivid pleasures appear as non-æsthetic, and because pleasure is recognized to be markedly evanescent, while beauty is thought of as at least relatively permanent.

It is true also that there is a hesitancy in using the word 'pleasure' in this connection, many writers preferring the less definite word 'feeling' in English, and &#39;Gefuhr&#39; in German. But by a large number of psychologists the words 'pleasure' and 'feeling' are used as synonyms; and those who agree with me that what we loosely call 'feeling' is broader than mere 'pleasure,' must note that it is the pleasurable aspect of what is called 'feeling' alone that is essentially related to our experience of the sense of beauty. All of us agree, in any event, that the sense of beauty is highly pleasant; and, in fact, most of our æstheticians have come to assume tacitly in their writings that the field of æsthetics must be treated as a field of pleasure-getting; and this, whether or not they attempt to indicate the relation of pleasure-getting to the sense of beauty.

The suggestion that pleasure of a certain type is of the essence