UTILITARIAN DOCTRINE 211 



created beautiful for the delight of man, — a belief wliich it 

 has been pronounced is subversive of my whole theory, — I 

 may first remark that the sense of beauty obviously depends 

 on the nature of the mind, irrespective of any real quality 

 in the admired object; and that the idea of what is beautiful, 

 is not innate or unalterable. We see this, for instance, in 

 the men of different races admiring an entirely different 

 standard of beauty in their women. If beautiful objects had 

 been created solely for man's gratification, it ought to be 

 shown that before man appeared, there was less beauty on 

 the face of the earth than since he came on the stage. Were 

 the beautiful volute and cone shells of the Eocene epoch, and 

 the gracefully sculptured ammonites of the Secondary period, 

 created that man might ages afterwards admire them in his 

 cabinet? Few objects are more beautiful than the minute 

 siliceous cases of the diatomaceae: were these created that 

 they might be examined and admired under the higher 

 powers of the microscope? The beauty in this latter case, 

 and in many others, is apparently wholly due to symmetry of 

 growth. Flowers rank amongst the most beautiful produc- 

 tions of nature; but they have been rendered conspfcuous in 

 contact with the green leaves, and in consequence at the 

 same time beautiful, so that they may be easily observed by 

 insects. I have come to this conclusion from finding it an 

 invariable rule that when a flower is fertilised by the wind 

 it never has a gaily-coloured corolla. Several plants habitu- 

 ally produce two kinds of flowers; one kind open and col- 

 oured so as to attract insects; the other closed, not coloured, 

 destitute of nectar, and never visited by insects. Hence we 

 may conclude that, if insects had not been developed on the 

 face of the earth, our plants would not have been decked with 

 beautiful flowers, but would have produced only such poor 

 flowers as we see on our fir, oak, nut and ash trees, on 

 grasses, spinach, docks, and nettles, which are all fertilised 

 through the agencv of the wind. A similar line of argument 

 holds°good with 'fruits; that a ripe strawberry or cherry 

 is as pleasing to the eye as to the palate— that tiie gaily- 

 coloured fruit of the spindle-wood tree and the scarlet ber- 

 ries of the holly are beautiful objects.— will be admitted by 

 every one. But this beauty serves merely as a guide to birds 



