Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/19

4 something pleasant — when we attend to it, it begins to be the latter.

Is this all? No. The peculiar quality which makes us distinguish it by a certain set of adjectives, of which the word beautiful is the type, seems to be describable by three chief characteristics, closely connected with each other.

i. It is a stable feeling — our pleasure in the something pleasant does not of itself pass into satiety, like the pleasures of eating and drinking. We get tired, e.g. at a concert, but that is not that we have had too much of the music; it is that our body and mind strike work. The aesthetic want is not a perishable want, which ceases in proportion as it is gratified.

ii. It is a relevant feeling — I mean it is attached, annexed, to the quality of some object — to all its detail — I would say “relative” if the word were not so ambiguous. One might say it is a special feeling, or a concrete feeling. I may be pleased for all sorts of reasons when I see or hear something, e.g. when I hear the dinner-bell,