404 Darwin, and after Darwin. 
reference to inorganic nature. Therefore, with the 
charm or the loveliness of landscapes, of earth and sea 
and sky, of pebbles, crystals, and so forth, we have at 
present nothing to do. Howit is that so many inani- 
mate objects are invested with beauty —why it is that 
beauty attaches to architecture, music, poetry, and 
many other things - these are questions which do not 
specially concern the biologist. If they are ever to 
receive any satisfactory explanation in terms of 
natural causation, this must be furnished at the hands 
of the psychologist. It may be possible for him to 
show, more satisfactorily than hitherto, that all beauty, 
whenever and wherever it occurs, is literally “in the 
eyes of the beholder”; orthat objectively considered, 
there is no such thing as beauty. It may be—and in 
my opinion it probably is—purely an affair of the 
percipient mind itself, depending on the association of 
ideas with pleasure-giving objects. This association 
may well lead to a liking for such objects, and so to the 
formation of what is known as esthetic feeling with 
regard to them. Moreover, beauty of inanimate nature 
must be an affair of the percipient mind itself, unless 
there be a creating intelligence with organs of sense 
and ideals of beauty similar to our own. And, apart 
from any deeper considerations, this latter possibility is 
scarcely entitled to be regarded as a probability, looking 
to the immense diversities in those ideals among dif- 
ferent races of mankind. But, be this as it may, the 
scientific problem which is presented by the fact of 
aesthetic feeling, even if it is ever to be satisfactorily 
solved, isa problem which. as already remarked, must 
be dealt with by psychologists. As biologists we have 
simply to accept this feeling as a fact, and to consider 
