THEORT OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN 19 



We are to some degree concerned with unity in the fields of logic and Esthetic 

 ethics, and, since we are practitioners of an applied art and a profession, ""^ 

 we have, almost as a constant factor, the economic element of use in all 

 our designs; nevertheless, since we are practitioners of a fine art, our 

 field is that of esthetics, and unity in this field is our especial concern. 



As we have found, the artist in the course of his life receives many Esthetic 

 impressions from external objects which he calls beautiful, that is, he ^''P''^"^°'^ 

 perceives with pleasure the unity of certain relations within these ob- Impression 

 jects, and he stores up in his mind the memory of the pleasurable re- 

 lations. When he designs, when he sets out to produce a pleasurable 

 emotion in the mind of someone else who shall behold the object which 

 he makes, he arranges or organizes the parts of this object according 

 to these remembered relations ; that is, he expresses in his design those 

 relations with which he has himself been previously impressed. And 

 the pleasurable emotion in the mind of the beholder arises from his 

 perception of this organization, of this subjection to a common law, of 

 this unity of the relation of the parts of the object. The state of mind 

 of the observer might be exactly the same if the pleasurable relations 

 which he finds to exist in the thing observed had come there purely by 

 accident and not by design. It is the observer's perception, his own 

 organization of the relations, that causes his pleasure. In this sense, 

 then, a thing which is perceived to be unified and organized may be 

 said to express to the mind of the observer this unity and organization ; 

 and in the field of esthetics, completeness of this expression, percep- 

 tion of complete esthetic organization with its necessarily accom- 

 panying pleasurable emotion, is what we call beauty. Actually, we 

 objectify this pleasurable perception and we attribute it as a quality 

 to an object, calling such an object beautiful, just as we objectify our 

 perceptions of yellowness and roundness, which go to make our percept 

 of an orange, and call the orange round and yellow. And so, speaking 

 objectively, objects are called beautiful which have a physical organiza- 

 tion such that their characteristics cause this perfect synthesis. 



We will, then, define beauty for our purposes, in the terms of the Definition 

 Italian philosopher Croce,* as "successful expression," "complete °J ^'<"*'y 



• Benedetto Croce, Estetica come Scienza delF Espressione e Linguistica generale, 

 Milano, 1902. English translation by Douglas Ainslee. 



