DEFINITIVE SYNTHESIS. 435 



Taste is the faculty which urges us to seek after the beautiful. 

 The glance of the eye simply teaches us to perceive that which is 

 right, good, better, beautiful, in preference to that which is ugly. " It 

 is, in some manner," says J. J. Rousseau, exquisitely, "the micro- 

 scope of our judgment ; it places small details within the reach of 

 judgment, and its work commences where that of the latter ends." 1 

 This is a very happy figure of speech, which explains well th^role of 

 taste in all the manifestations by which reason, tact, and intelligence 

 are shown. As an infallible guide it enlightens them by placing them, 

 so to speak, right in the focus of truth, in order that they may be pre- 

 served from error. For this very reason it must naturally precede them. 



Taste not only implies an intense perception, it also requires an ad- 

 miration for the beautiful, with a more or less clear consciousness of the 

 qualities which must have been combined and of the difficulties which 

 the breeder must have overcome in order to realize the beautiful mate- 

 rially. When we see a beautiful horse, it is not only his form, his grace- 

 fulness, his elegance, his vigor, etc., which arrest our attention ; it is the 

 scarcity of the model, the skilled labor of the man who produced it or 

 found it. The connoisseur possesses this advantage over the layman, 

 that he appreciates with greater competence the result both of natural 

 aptitude and of study, the details, the technical points which make 

 little or no impression upon the latter. Why ? Because his taste has 

 been better trained. Hence his judgment is more accurate and less 

 liable to error. And this superiority is far from being always the result 

 of solid theoretical studies. How many horsemen and horse-dealers 

 surprise us by their good selections ! Go into their stables, you will 

 find none but good horses, and yet from what books have they learned, 

 by what teachers have they been instructed ? The truth is, they have 

 good taste, they " take in" a horse and understand him at a glance ; 

 the surroundings amid which they have lived have developed their 

 special aptitudes and corrected their mistakes ; they have unknowingly 

 acquired an idea of the beautiful, this rara avis, and have applied their 

 efforts to discover and cultivate it. 



A person's judgment may be misleading when his taste becomes 

 depraved or is influenced by prejudice and fashion ; it is as though it 

 were guided by a wrong light, and then sees everything under a color 

 which is not the true one. It is therefore of great importance to 

 develop taste, to cultivate it by the ever-renewed spectacle of the 

 beauties of nature. In this connection especially is the guidance of a 



1 J. J. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloise, 12e lettre a Julie. 



