i87o— 1882] JOHN MORLEY 325 



at all improbable, as it is almost a lifetime since I attended to Letter 241 

 the philosophy of aesthetics, and did not then think that I 

 should ever make use of my conclusions. Can you refer me 

 to any one or two books (for my power of reading is not 

 great) which would illumine me ? or can you explain in one or 

 two sentences how I err ? Perhaps it would be best for me 

 to explain what I mean by the sense of beauty in its lowest 

 stage of development, and which can only apply to animals. 

 When an intense colour, or two tints in harmony, or a re- 

 current and symmetrical figure please the eye, or a single 

 sweet note pleases the ear, I call this a sense of beauty ; and 

 with this meaning I have spoken (though I now see in not a 

 sufficiently guarded manner) of a taste for the beautiful being 

 the same in mankind (for all savages admire bits of bright 

 cloth, beads, plumes, etc.) and in the lower animals. If the 

 blue and yellow plumage of a macaw 1 pleases the eye of this 

 bird, I should say that it had a sense of beauty, although its 

 taste was bad according to our standard. Now, will you have 

 the kindness to tell me how I can learn to see the error of 

 my ways ? Of course I recognise, as indeed I have remarked 

 in my book, that the sense of beauty in the case of scenery, 

 pictures, etc., is something infinitely complex, depending on 

 varied associations and culture of the mind. From a very 

 interesting review in the Spectator, and from your and 

 Wallace's review, I perceive that I have made a great over- 

 sight in not having said what little I could on the acquisition 



description and examination of Sexual Selection a way of speaking of 

 beauty, which seems to us to be highly un philosophical, because it assumes 

 a certain theory of beauty, which the most competent modern thinkers are 

 too far from accepting, to allow its assumption to be quite judicious. . . . 

 Why should we only find the ;esthetic quality in birds wonderful, when it 

 happens to coincide with our own ? In other words, why attribute to them 

 conscious aesthetic qualities at all ? There is no more positive reason for 

 attributing aesthetic consciousness to the Argus pheasant than there is 

 for attributing to bees geometric consciousness of the hexagonal prisms 

 and rhombic plates of the hive which they so marvellously construct. 

 Hence the phraseology which Mr. Darwin employs in this part of the 

 subject, though not affecting the degree of probability which may belong 

 to this theory, seems to us to be very loose scientifically, and philosophi- 

 cally most misleading." Pall Mall Gazette. 



' K " What man deems the horrible contrasts of yellow and blue attract 

 the macaw, while ball-and-socket-plumage attracts the Argus pheasant " 

 — Pall Mall Gazette, March 21st, 1871, p. 1075. 



