422 AESTHETICS 



This view is strengthened when we consider that the application 

 of the term by individuals changes as they develop naturally or by 

 processes of education; and that the standards of beauty alter in 

 like manner in a race from generation to generation as it advances 

 in its development. 



We must then look for the essence of beauty in some quality of 

 our mental states which is called up by different objective impres- 

 sions in different people, and under diverse conditions by different 

 objects at different times in the same individual. 



Search for such a quality has led not a few psychologists to look 

 to pleasure as the quality of our mental states which is most likely 

 to meet our demand. It is true that the consideration of pleasure 

 as of the essence of the sense of beauty has not often been seriously 

 carried out ; apparently because so many of what we speak of as our 

 most vivid pleasures appear as non-aesthetic; and because pleasure 

 is recognized to be markedly evanescent, while beauty is thought of 

 as at least relatively permanent. 



It is true, also, that there is a hesitancy in using the word pleasure 

 in this connection; many writers preferring the less definite word 

 "feeling" in English, and "gefiihl" in German. But by a large 

 number of psychologists the words pleasure and feeling are used as 

 synonyms; and those who, with me, agree that what we loosely call 

 feeling is broader than mere pleasure, must note that it is the pleas- 

 urable aspect alone of what is called "feeling" that is essentially 

 related to our experience of the sense of beauty. 



All of us agree, in any event, that the sense of beauty is highly 

 pleasant; and, in fact, most of our sestheticians have come to assume 

 tacitly in their writings that the field of aesthetics must be treated 

 as a field of pleasure-getting; and this whether or not they attempt 

 to indicate the relation of pleasure-getting to the sense of beauty. 



The suggestion that pleasure of a certain type is of the essence of 

 beauty seems the more likely to prove to be satisfactory when we 

 consider that pleasure is universally acknowledged to be the con- 

 tradictory opposite of pain; and that we have in ugliness, which is 

 always unpleasant, a contradictory opposite of beauty. 1 



Clearly then it behooves the psychologist to give to the aesthetician 

 an account of the nature of pleasure which shall be compatible with 

 the pleasurable nature of the sense of beauty; and which shall either 

 explain the nature of this sense of beauty in terms of pleasure, or 

 explain the nature of pleasure in a manner which shall throw light 

 upon the nature of this sense of beauty to which pleasure is so indis- 

 solubly attached. 



1 It is of course agreed that beauty and ugliness may be held together in a 

 complex impression: but in such cases the beauty and the ugliness are inherent 

 in diverse elements of the complex. 



