arrower limits than do the external
exigencies of life.

_The relation of utility to beauty._

Sec. 39. This natural harmony between utility and beauty, when its
origin is not understood, is of course the subject of much perplexed
and perplexing theory. Sometimes we are told that utility is itself
the essence of beauty, that is, that our consciousness of the
practical advantages of certain forms is the ground of our aesthetic
admiration of them. The horse's legs are said to be beautiful
because they are fit to run, the eye because it is made to see, the
house because it is convenient to live in. An amusing application --
which might pass for a _reductio ad absurdum,_ -- of this dense
theory is put by Xenophon into the mouth of Socrates. Comparing
himself with a youth present at the same banquet, who was about
to receive the prize of beauty, Socrates declares himself more
beautiful and more worthy of the crown. For utility makes beauty,
and eyes bulging out from the head like his are the most
advantageous for seeing; nostrils wide and open to the air, like his,
most appropriate for smell; and a mouth large and voluminous, like
his, best fitted for both eating and kissing.[11]

Now since these things are, in fact, hideous, the theory that shows
they _ought to be_ beautiful, is vain and ridiculous. But that
theory contains this truth: that had the utility of Socratic features
been so great that men of all other type must have perished,
Socrates would have been beautiful. He would have represented
the human type. The eye would have been then accustomed to that
form, the imagination would have taken it as the basis of its
refinements, and accentuated its naturally effective points. The
beautiful does not depend on the useful; it is constituted by the
imagination in ignorance and contempt of practical advantage; but
it is not independent of the necessary, for the necessary must also
be the habitual and consequently the basis of the type, and of all its
imaginative variations.

There are, moreover, at a late and derivative stage in our aesthetic
judgment, certain cases in which the knowledge of fitness and
utility enters into our sense of beauty. But it does so very indirectly,
rather by convincing us that we should tolerate what practical
conditions have imposed on an artist, by arousing admiration of his
ingenuity, or by suggesting the interesting things themselves with
which the object is known to be connected. Thus a