extent; they may be cultivated or checked, directed or diverted, gifted
by right guidance with the most acute and faultless sense, or subjected
by neglect to every phase of error and disease. He who has followed up
these natural laws of aversion and desire, rendering them more and more
authoritative by constant obedience, so as to derive pleasure always
from that which God originally intended should give him pleasure, and
who derives the greatest possible sum of pleasure from any given object,
is a man of taste.

Sec. 2. Definition of the term "taste."

This, then, is the real meaning of this disputed word. Perfect taste is
the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those
material sources which are attractive to our moral nature in its purity
and perfection. He who receives little pleasure from these sources,
wants taste; he who receives pleasure from any other sources, has false
or bad taste.

Sec. 3. Distinction between taste and judgment.

And it is thus that the term "taste" is to be distinguished from that of
"judgment," with which it is constantly confounded. Judgment is a
general term, expressing definite action of the intellect, and
applicable to every kind of subject which can be submitted to it. There
may be judgment of congruity, judgment of truth, judgment of justice,
and judgment of difficulty and excellence. But all these exertions of
the intellect are totally distinct from taste, properly so called, which
is the instinctive and instant preferring of one material object to
another without any obvious reason, except that it is proper to human
nature in its perfection so to do.

Sec. 4. How far beauty may become intellectual.

Observe, however, I do not mean by excluding direct exertion of the
intellect from ideas of beauty, to assert that beauty has no effect upon
nor connection with the intellect. All our moral feelings are so
in-woven with our intellectual powers, that we cannot affect the one
without in some degree addressing the other; and in all high ideas of
beauty, it is more than probable that much of the pleasure depends on
delicate and untraceable perceptions of fitness, propriety, and
relation, which are purely intellectual, and through which we arrive at
our noblest ideas of what is commonly and rightly called "intellectual
beauty." But there is yet no immediate _exertion_ of the intellect; that
is to say, if a person receiving even the noblest ideas of simple bea