tion. Human nature branches into
opposed and incompatible characters. And taste follows this
bifurcation. We cannot, except whimsically, say that a taste for
music is higher or lower than a taste for sculpture. A man might be
a musician and a sculptor by turns; that would only involve a
perfectly conceivable enlargement in human genius. But the union
thus effected would be an accumulation of gifts in the observer, not
a combination of beauties in the object. The excellence of
sculpture and that of music would remain entirely independent and
heterogeneous. Such divergences are like those of the outer senses
to which these arts appeal. Sound and colour have analogies only
in their lowest depth, as vibrations and excitement; as they grow
specific and objective, they diverge; and although the same
consciousness perceives them, it perceives them as unrelated and
uncombinable objects.

The ideal enlargement of human capacity, therefore, has no
tendency to constitute a single standard of beauty. These standards
remain the expression of diverse habits of sense and imagination.
The man who combines the greatest range with the greatest
endowment in each particular, will, of course, be the critic most
generally respected. He will express the feelings of the greater
number of men. The advantage of scope in criticism lies not in the
improvement of our sense in each particular field; here the artist
will detect the amateur's shortcomings. But no man is a specialist
with his whole soul. Some latent capacity he has for other
perceptions; and it is for the awakening of these, and their
marshalling before him, that the student of each kind of beauty
turns to the lover of them all.

The temptation, therefore, to say that all things are really equally
beautiful arises from an imperfect analysis, by which the
operations of the aesthetic consciousness are only partially
disintegrated. The dependence of the _degrees_ of beauty upon
our nature is perceived, while the dependence of its _essence_
upon our nature is still ignored. All things are not equally beautiful
because the subjective bias that discriminates between them is the
cause of their being beautiful at all. The principle of personal
preference is the same as that of human taste; real and objective
beauty, in contrast to a vagary of individuals, means only an
affinity to a more prevalent and lasting susceptibility, a
response toa more general and fundamental demand. And the keene