Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/625

609 contemplation, judgment, and approval, and quite rightly, on the basis of beauty as defined. But when he speaks of admiring an odor "for the perfection of its charm," a rose for its fragrance, a peach for its color, because they satisfy our senses, he has clearly left the objective point of view, from which a thing is beautiful because of the perfection of its own life, independent of our reaction upon it.

M. Souriau is careful to distinguish between the pleasure in our sensations, and our judgment of them as perfect, allowing full æsthetic quality only to the last. But it is not easy to see how a judgment of the perfection of our experience can logically intrude at all, in the case of a separate object given to contemplation, since its æsthetic quality is supposed to be covered by its perfection or striking excellence as a type. This would appear, indeed, from other passages. "It is certainly beauty, when the pleasure which I feel is due to the presence in the object of some intrinsic excellence, which it reveals to me. ... The perceptions of touch are more instructive than those even of sight; they give us the most intimate knowledge of the molecular structure of bodies, true beauty of matter" (p. 268). The same criticism might be made of the treatment of intellectual beauty. The true intellectual beauty is said to be that which responds to our most profound intellectual instinct (p. 349). But we are vowed by our definition of beauty to neglect the quality which satisfies our functions in favor of that which attests the fulfilment of the object's functions. As M. Souriau says, in harmony with his first theory, we admire a circle for being a perfect circle, not because the form pleases us.

The beauty of thought, with especial reference to literary beauty, is divided into beauty of form and of content. The form of thought is shown to consist only in the verbal expression; thus all beauty of form here consists in the transmission, direct, immediate, integral, of the thought. As to content, "it is not by the stimulation, more or less intense, more or less agreeable, which I receive from a work, but by the sum of intellectual and moral energies required to work it up, that I shall judge its value." "A beautiful page is that wherein there is intelligence, imagination, and heart" (p. 421). A literary work, that is, is as it were a kind of person, and is to be judged as a man would be, as to character, intellect, temperament, etc. To give it an excellent character is to say that it is beautiful. This may be understood for literature; but the very fact that M. Souriau has practically nothing to say of the other representative arts,—the painter's, the sculptor's art,—in their dealing with life, shows