Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/251

No. 2.] and events play an æsthetic role. This is not the case. Strictly speaking, neither material objects nor states of consciousness by themselves can possess beauty, which resides rather in the manifestation of states of consciousness by material phenomena. No sensation as such can be called beautiful, but merely agreeable or disagreeable. Even Naville's examples contain a formal element which overpasses pure sensation. Nor is there moral beauty, if we would preserve the sense of the word 'beauty.' Further, it would be better to distinguish by name literary, musical, and plastic beauty, and apply the term 'beauty' in its technical sense to plastic beauty alone. We must distinguish between the phenomena that Naville classes together as "expression." Natural bodily movements are "expressive" of mental states, language is "significant" of thought, and all the indirect manifestations and products of mental activity are "suggestive" of the latter. The beauty of an object for us does not consist in the sentiments which it suggests, nor in the ideas which it may signify, but in its expression properly speaking, in so far as this is pleasing to the spectator. Not all agreeable expression, however, is beautiful. Uncouth manifestations of joy, for instance, may be pleasing, because they appeal to our human sympathy, but they are clearly not beautiful. Beauty, then, is a kind of agreeable expression. This is the first and most important distinction to make. There are two kinds of expression, each of which may be agreeable or disagreeable: (1) the transitory expression of feeling by the motions of the body, and (2) the permanent expression of consciousness by the body itself. It is for the latter, when its contemplation procures a certain pleasure, that we reserve the name 'beauty,' though of course there is no hard and fast line between the transient and the permanent. It is such expression that we find in the greatest works of Greek sculpture.

E. A.

We can express in two ways a fundamental fact of experience. We say (1) an object in consciousness exists; (2) there is a consciousness of the object. Physical science deals with the former, more objective side of the experience. (' Objective ' has two senses. More narrowly, it applies to all that belongs to the "primitive perceptual object-in-consciousness"; this is its signification in physical science: in a wider sense, the word 'object' denotes what