uld really define must be nothing less than the exposition of the
origin, place, and elements of beauty as an object of human
experience. We must learn from it, as far as possible, why, when,
and how beauty appears, what conditions an object must fulfil to
be beautiful, what elements of our nature make us sensible of
beauty, and what the relation is between the constitution of the
object and the excitement of our susceptibility. Nothing less will
really define beauty or make us understand what aesthetic
appreciation is. The definition of beauty in this sense will be the
task of this whole book, a task that can be only very imperfectly
accomplished within its limits.

The historical titles of our subject may give us a hint towards the
beginning of such a definition. Many writers of the last century
called the philosophy of beauty _Criticism,_ and the word is still
retained as the title for the reasoned appreciation of works of art.
We could hardly speak, however, of delight in nature as criticism.
A sunset is not criticised; it is felt and enjoyed. The word
"criticism," used on such an occasion, would emphasize too much
the element of deliberate judgment and of comparison with
standards. Beauty, although often so described, is seldom so
perceived, and all the greatest excellences of nature and art are so
far from being approved of by a rule that they themselves furnish
the standard and ideal by which critics measure inferior effects.

This age of science and of nomenclature has accordingly adopted a
more learned word, _Aesthetics,_ that is, the theory of perception
or of susceptibility. If criticism is too narrow a word, pointing
exclusively to our more artificial judgments, aesthetics seems to be
too broad and to include within its sphere all pleasures and pains, if
not all perceptions whatsoever. Kant used it, as we know, for his
theory of time and space as forms of all perception; and it has at
times been narrowed into an equivalent for the philosophy of art.

If we combine, however, the etymological meaning of criticism
with that of aesthetics, we shall unite two essential qualities of the
theory of beauty. Criticism implies judgment, and aesthetics
perception. To get the common ground, that of perceptions which
are critical, or judgments which are perceptions, we must widen
our notion of deliberate criticism so as to include those judgments
of value which are instinctive and immediate, that is, to include
pleasu