lectual datum. Our
interest in facts and theories, when not aesthetic, is of course
practical; it consists in their connexion with our interests, and in
the service they can render us in the execution of our designs.
Intellectual values are utilitarian in their origin but aesthetic in
their form, since the advantage of knowledge is often lost sight of,
and ideas are prized for their own sake. Curiosity can become a
disinterested passion, and yield intimate and immediate satisfaction
like any other impulse.

When we have before us, for instance, a fine map, in which the line
of coast, now rocky, now sandy, is clearly indicated, together with
the windings of the rivers, the elevations of the land, and the
distribution of the population, we have the simultaneous
suggestion of so many facts, the sense of mastery over so much
reality, that we gaze at it with delight, and need no practical motive
to keep us studying it, perhaps for hours together. A map is not
naturally thought of as an aesthetic object; it is too exclusively
expressive. The first term is passed over as a mere symbol, and the
mind is filled either with imaginations of the landscape the country
would really offer, or with thoughts about its history and
inhabitants. These circumstances prevent the ready objectification
of our pleasure in the map itself. And yet, let the tints of it be a
little subtle, let the lines be a little delicate, and the masses of land
and sea somewhat balanced, and we really have a beautiful thing; a
thing the charm of which consists almost entirely in its meaning,
but which nevertheless pleases us in the same way as a picture or a
graphic symbol might please. Give the symbol a little intrinsic
worth of form, line, and colour, and it attracts like a magnet all the
values of the things it is known to symbolize. It becomes beautiful
in its expressiveness.

Hardly different from this example is that of travel or of reading;
for in these employments we get many aesthetic pleasures, the
origin of which is in the satisfaction of curiosity and intelligence.
When we say admiringly of anything that it is characteristic, that it
embodies a whole period or a whole man, we are absorbed by the
pleasant sense that it offers innumerable avenues of approach to
interesting and important things. The less we are able to specify
what these are, the more beautiful will the object be that expresses
them. For if we could specify them, the felt value would