do so by recalling the circumstances in which it occurred.

In distinguishing, then, in our sense of beauty, an appreciation of
sensible material, one of abstract form, and another of associated
values, we have been merely following the established method of
psychology, the only one by which it is possible to analyze the
mind. We have distinguished the elements of the object, and
treated the feeling as if it were composed of corresponding parts.
The worlds of nature and fancy, which are the object of aesthetic
feeling, can be divided into parts in space and time. We can then
distinguish the material of things from the various forms it may
successively assume; we can distinguish, also, the earlier and the
later impressions made by the same object; and we can ascertain
the coexistence of one impression with another, or with the
memory of others. But aesthetic feeling itself has no parts, and this
physiology of its causes is not a description of its proper nature.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what
it means can never be said. By appealing to experiment and
memory we can show that this feeling varies as certain things vary
in the objective conditions; that it varies with the frequency, for
instance, with which a form has been presented, or with the
associates which that form has had in the past. This will justify a
description of the feeling as composed of the various contributions
of these objects. But the feeling itself knows nothing of
composition nor contributions. It is an affection of the soul, a
consciousness of joy and security, a pang, a dream, a pure pleasure.
It suffuses an object without telling why; nor has it any need to ask
the question. It justifies itself and the vision it gilds; nor is there
any meaning in seeking for a cause of it, in this inward sense.
Beauty exists for the same reason that the object which is beautiful
exists, or the world in which that object lies, or we that look upon
both. It is an experience: there is nothing more to say about it.
Indeed, if we look at things teleologically, and as they ultimately
justify themselves to the heart, beauty is of all things what least
calls for explanation. For matter and space and time and principles
of reason and of evolution, all are ultimately brute, unaccountable
data. We may describe what actually is, but it might have been
otherwise, and the mystery of its being is as baffling and dark as
ever.

But we, -