ll Gazette.") This is not at all improbable,
as it is almost a lifetime since I attended to the philosophy of
aesthetics, and did not then think that I should ever make use of my
conclusions. Can you refer me to any one or two books (for my power of
reading is not great) which would illumine me? or can you explain in one
or two sentences how I err? Perhaps it would be best for me to explain
what I mean by the sense of beauty in its lowest stage of development,
and which can only apply to animals. When an intense colour, or two
tints in harmony, or a recurrent and symmetrical figure please the eye,
or a single sweet note pleases the ear, I call this a sense of
beauty; and with this meaning I have spoken (though I now see in not a
sufficiently guarded manner) of a taste for the beautiful being the same
in mankind (for all savages admire bits of bright cloth, beads, plumes,
etc.) and in the lower animals. If the blue and yellow plumage of a
macaw (241/2. "What man deems the horrible contrasts of yellow and blue
attract the macaw, while ball-and-socket-plumage attracts the Argus
pheasant"--"Pall Mall Gazette," March 21st, 1871, page 1075.) pleases
the eye of this bird, I should say that it had a sense of beauty,
although its taste was bad according to our standard. Now, will you have
the kindness to tell me how I can learn to see the error of my ways? Of
course I recognise, as indeed I have remarked in my book, that the
sense of beauty in the case of scenery, pictures, etc., is something
infinitely complex, depending on varied associations and culture of the
mind. From a very interesting review in the "Spectator," and from your
and Wallace's review, I perceive that I have made a great oversight in
not having said what little I could on the acquisition of the sense
for the beautiful by man and the lower animals. It would indeed be an
immense advantage to an author if he could read such criticisms as yours
before publishing. At page 11 of your review you accidentally misquote
my words placed by you within inverted commas, from my Volume II., page
354: I say that "man cannot endure any great change," and the omitted
words "any great" make all the difference in the discussion. (241/3.
"Mr. Darwin tells us, and gives us excellent reasons for thinking, that
'the men of each race prefer what they are accustomed to behold; they
cannot endure change.' Yet is there not an inconsistency between this
fact and the other that one race diff