Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/99

84 and the only word we can find for this property is the word “beautiful.” And, as we shall see, the degrees of its usage, its variations, make it impossible finally to draw a line between what is beautiful and what is not anywhere within this wide range of the aesthetically excellent. I mean, then, that this wide use of the word, “beautiful,” is in the end the right use.

ii. But again, while ordinary people survive, we shall want a word for what is prima facie aesthetically pleasant; or pleasant to the ordinary sensibility; and for this we shall never get the common use of language to abandon the word “beautiful.” We shall always find opposition if we say even that the sublime is a form of the beautiful, and when we come to the stern and terrible and grotesque and humorous, if we call them beautiful we shall, as a rule, be in conflict with usage. And I take it there is a real specific difference between a beautiful and the sublime, for instance.

So then, we may say that beauty in the