res and pains; and at the same time we must narrow our
notion of aesthetics so as to exclude all perceptions which are not
appreciations, which do not find a value in their objects. We thus
reach the sphere of critical or appreciative perception, which is,
roughly speaking, what we mean to deal with. And retaining the
word "aesthetics," which is now current, we may therefore say that
aesthetics is concerned with the perception of values. The meaning
and conditions of value is, then, what we must first consider.

Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to
philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained
by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of
the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely
physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not
essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth
and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without
possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection
might have secured the survival of those automata which made
useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct of
self-preservation would have been developed, dangers would have been
shunned without being feared, and injuries revenged without being
felt.

In such a world there might have come to be the most perfect
organization. There would have been what we should call the
expression of the deepest interests and the apparent pursuit of
conceived goods. For there would have been spontaneous and
ingrained tendencies to avoid certain contingencies and to produce
others; all the dumb show and evidence of thinking would have
been patent to the observer. Yet there would surely have been no
thinking, no expectation, and no conscious achievement in the
whole process.

The onlooker might have feigned ends and objects of forethought,
as we do in the case of the water that seeks its own level, or in that
of the vacuum which nature abhors. But the particles of matter
would have remained unconscious of their collocation, and all
nature would have been insensible of their changing arrangement.
We only, the possible spectators of that process, by virtue of our
own interests and habits, could see any progress or culmination in
it. We should see culmination where the result attained satisfied
our practical or aesthetic demands, and progress wherever such a
satisfaction was approached. But apar