BEAUTV, &C.J IN ARCHITECTURE. 201 



want of some analytical principles to guide the ai-chitect in design- 

 ing public buildings, and the public in judging of them. That a 

 great many men have the same views with myself, and infinitely 

 surpass me in their researches, is very true ; but it is equally as true 

 that the greater number have what ajjpears to me a very erroneous 

 idea of the subject. 



Artists, by the very nature of their occupation, are accustomed to 

 think more of the causes or things which produce the emotions of 

 taste than of the nature of the emotions themselves. From this ha- 

 bit they are apt to imagine that there is, in the constitution of man, 

 some one sense, with its organ, by which beauty is perceived and 

 felt ; this brings along with it the idea that certain forms of matter 

 are intrinsically and inherently beautiful in themselves. On the 

 contrary, men of retired habits and philosophic minds resist the idea 

 of any such particular sense; they suppose the foundation of the 

 emotion of taste to reside in some general law of our constitution. 

 Such were the theories, a thousand years ago, of St. Austin, who 

 attributes these emotions to our perceptions of order or design ; and 

 of Mr. Hume, who attributes them to our sense of utility. These 

 were the kinds of theories which prevailed until IMr. Alison, in the 

 year 1790, published his Essays on Taste, in which quite a new 

 theory is submitted. 



The foundation on which the former systems were raised was the 

 supposition that the emotion of beauty was a simple emotion : Mr. 

 Alison supposes it to be a complex one. And after a very minute 

 and careful examination, most plentifully illustrated, he comes to 

 the conclusion that, " whenever the emotions of beauty or sublimity 

 are felt, that exercise of imagination is produced which consists in 

 the prosecution of a train of thoughts ;" and that the difference be- 

 tween such trains and our ordinary trains of thought " consists, 1st. 

 In the ideas which compose them being, in all cases, ideas of emo- 

 tion ; and 2nd. To their possessing an uniform principle of con- 

 nexion through the whole of the train." So that the pleasure aris- 

 ing from the emotions of taste results from the conjunction of the 

 pleasure of simple emotion with that Avhich, by the constitution of 

 our nature, we feel when our imagination is exercised ; with this 

 proviso, that such exercise is employed in the prosecution of a " re- 

 gular train of ideas of emotion." 



Although I think Mr. Alison has, in his Essays, proved his the- 

 ory to be correct, he has failed in applying it to the examples he il- 

 lustrates in several instances. His division of the kinds of lines 

 whicli bound olyccts, and in which their expression is supposed to 



