strial
ideal of efficiency has, "with its suggestion of Dutch
neatness and cleanliness," order and symmetry, an aesthetic
flavor. Similarly is there an appeal to our aesthetic sensibilities
in the grouping of a wide variety of facts under sweeping
inclusive and simple generalizations. There is, as has often
been pointed out, scarcely anything to choose from as regards
the relative plausibility of the Copernican over the Ptolemaic
system. The former we choose largely because of its greater
symmetry and simplicity in accounting for the facts. Even a
world view may be chosen on account of its artistic appeal.
One feels moved imaginatively, even if one disagrees with the
logic of those philosophies which see reality as one luminously
transparent conscious whole, in which every experience is
delicately reticulated with every other, where discord and
division are obliterated, and the multiple variety of mundane
facts are gathered up into the symmetrical unity of the eternal.

APPRECIATION _VERSUS_ ACTION. Every human experience has
thus its particular and curious aesthetic flavor, as an inevitable
though undetected obligato. AEsthetic values enter into and
qualify our estimates of persons and situations, and help to
determine that general sympathy or revulsion, that love or
hate for people, institutions, or ideas, which make the pervasive
atmosphere of all human action. But in the world of
action, we cannot emphasize these irrelevant aesthetic feelings.
The appreciative and the practical moods are sharply contrasted.
In the latter we are interested in results, and insist
on the exclusion of all considerations that do not bear on
their accomplishment. The appreciative or aesthetic mood is
detached; it is interested not to act, but to pause and consider;
it does not want to use the present as a point of departure.
It wants to bask in the present perfection of color, word, or
sound. The practical man is interested in a present situation
for what can be done with it; he wants to know, in the vernacular,
"What comes next?" "Where do we go from here?"
The appreciator wishes to remain in the lovely interlude of
perfection which he experiences in music, poetry, or painting.

The aesthetic mood is obviously at a discount in the world
of action. To bask in the charm of a present situation, to
linger and loiter, as it were, in the sun of beauty, is to accomplish
nothing, to interrupt action. It is precisely for this
reason that pe