20 LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



spiritual esthetic synthesis," that is, perception of complete esthetic 

 organization. 



Beauty is thus complete unity of organization ; ugliness is lack of 

 unity. If a thing has beauty, but fails of being absolutely beautiful, 

 it can in every case be shown that such beauty as it has is beauty of 

 certain parts or aspects which are in themselves perfectly unified. 

 Beauty can exist in one degree only, perfect beauty; ugliness, being 

 disunity, can exist in all degrees, from what might be called beauty with 

 a flaw to disunity so complete that the mind can hardly grasp the dis- 

 similar mass of detail as forming one entity at all. 



Many definitions of beauty make it not a perceptive synthesis, as 

 we have just said, but an emotion. Professor Santayana, for instance, 

 says, "Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing."* The 

 difference is, we believe, purely one of statement. Any perception is 

 inevitably attended with an emotion, pleasurable or otherwise, this 

 emotion being in a great majority of cases so slight as not to be noticed. 

 As the unity of an object becomes more and more evident, the ease and 

 completeness of the synthesis — arising from unity of impressions, 

 and consonance of these with the mental content — becomes greater, 

 and the consequent pleasurable emotion becomes stronger. Thus a 

 beautiful object, that is, an object so organized as to cause a complete 

 synthesis in the observer's mind, should be perceived with the greatest 

 possible amount of this kind of pleasure. And as the act of perception 

 is in itself commonly unconscious, it is this pleasurable emotion which 

 attracts our attention as the essence of beauty. 



The pleasure accompanying the formation of a percept is greater 

 as this percept fits more completely the ideal for this particular kind 

 of percept existing already in the mind of the beholder. The more 

 nearly complete the unity of this percept and its subjection to its own 

 ruling law, the more nearly it usually fits this ideal, since this ideal is 

 normally formed under the same law. It is emphasis of this aspect 

 of the perception of beauty that has given rise to definitions of beauty 

 as approximation to an ideal. The conception of beauty as approxi- 

 mation to an ideal or standard has caused people to believe that there 

 must be universal standards of beauty to which objects must conform 



* George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1896. 



