ON THE ESTHETIC SENSE IN ANIMALS. 733 



A posteriori : it is plain that a man's first movement, as regards 

 the good, is almost always right ; as regards the beautiful, almost 

 always wrong. Listen to the crowd, judging by its moral estimate of 

 an event that has taken place under its eyes, when no interest nor 

 passion misleads it: what good sense, what fairness, what insight, 

 what right intentions, what generous sympathies ! Then hear it dis- 

 coursing on the merit of works of art : what wretched taste, what 

 glaring mistakes, what ridiculous enthusiasm, what sad a~d utter 

 going astray ! " The people," writes Diderot to Grimm, " looks at 

 every thing, and gets at the meaning of nothing." But do you ask 

 for still more decisive and clear practical proofs of the immense dis- 

 tance that separates knowledge of the good from that of the beauti- 

 ful in the human mind ? A petit jury, though it decides on the lib- 

 erty, life, and honor of an accused person, is drawn merely by lot, be- 

 cause each citizen can judge as well as every other, upon evidence 

 and discussion, of the truth and morality of an alleged fact. But do 

 we choose the jury which has to award the prize of a competition 

 from the same list and in the same way ? No ! in that case we must 

 choose among the most skilled and the best qualified specialists. 



But what need of demonstrating what his own experience tells 

 every one ? Among these skilled and special jurors where is the one 

 who will not confess that he at first was, and long continued to be, the 

 dupe of his ignorance ? Which of them is not aware that taste for 

 the arts, and, still more, taste in the arts, came to him only after a long 

 time, after lucky and often casual experiences, after protracted stud- 

 ies, repeated comparisons, a constant exertion of the powers of see- 

 ing, understanding, feeling, judging? And who does not know, by 

 having learned it in himself, that in the arts — except perhaps in mu- 

 sic, which filters in unconsciously to those who hear it — emotions come 

 in the train of reasonings, and that the first condition of positive ad- 

 miration is knowledge? "I am fully persuaded," says Sir Joshua 

 Reynolds, in one of his " Fifteen Discourses," " that the pleasure 

 yielded us by the perfections of art is a taste which we acquire only by 

 long study and with much labor." 



Those who choose to attribute too liberally to all men the sense 

 of the beautiful as well as that of the good, attempt to support their 

 opinion by a fact. They cite the instance of Athens, where, they say, 

 competition in the arts was open to all in the public arena, where the 

 whole people formed the tribunal. The instance is misleading, and I 

 take it the other way, to sustain my proposition. Without insisting 

 on the special genius of ancient Greece among the other nations 

 of the world, and that of the Athenian people among the other 

 peoples of Greece, I will merely point out that this people of Athens, 

 so small m its territory and population, so great in its deeds and re- 

 nown, consisted of about forty thousand free citizens, served by four 

 hundred thousand slaves. Now, the slaves, charged with all manual 



