cottage-chimney,
stout and tall, with the smoke floating from it, pleases because
we fancy it to mean a hearth, a rustic meal, and a comfortable
family. But that is all extraneous association. The most
ordinary way in which utility affects us is negatively; if we
know a thing to be useless and fictitious, the uncomfortable
haunting sense of waste and trickery prevents all enjoyment, and
therefore banishes beauty. But this is also an adventitious
complication. The intrinsic value of a form is in no way affected by it.

Opposed to this utilitarian theory stands the metaphysical one that
would make the beauty or intrinsic rightness of things the source of
their efficiency and of their power to survive. Taken literally, as it
is generally meant, this idea must, from our point of view, appear
preposterous. Beauty and rightness are relative to our judgment
and emotion; they in no sense exist in nature or preside over her.
She everywhere appears to move by mechanical law. The types of
things exist by what, in relation to our approbation, is mere chance,
and it is our faculties that must adapt themselves to our
environment and not our environment to our faculties. Such is the
naturalistic point of view which we have adopted.

To say, however, that beauty is in some sense the ground of
practical fitness, need not seem to us wholly unmeaning. The fault
of the Platonists who say things of this sort is seldom that of
emptiness. They have an intuition; they have sometimes a strong
sense of the facts of consciousness. But they turn their discoveries
into so many revelations, and the veil of the infinite and absolute
soon covers their little light of specific truth. Sometimes, after
patient digging, the student comes upon the treasure of some
simple fact, some common experience, beneath all their mystery
and unction. And so it may be in this case. If we make allowances
for the tendency to express experience in allegory and myth, we
shall see that the idea of beauty and rationality presiding over
nature and guiding her, as it were, for their own greater glory, is a
projection and a writing large of a psychological principle.

The mind that perceives nature is the same that understands and
enjoys her; indeed, these three functions are really elements of one
process. There is therefore in the mere perceptibility of a thing a
certain prophecy of its beauty; if it were not on the road to beauty,
if it had no approach to fitness to our