processes of volition into the
consciousness of one adorable influence.

However deceptive these complications may prove to men of
action and eloquence, they ought not to impose on the critic of
human nature. Evidently what value general goods do not derive
from the particular satisfactions they stand for, they possess in
themselves as ideas pleasing and powerful over the imagination.
This intrinsic advantage of certain principles and methods is none
the less real for being in a sense aesthetic. Only a sordid
utilitarianism that subtracts the imagination from human nature, or
at least slurs over its immense contribution to our happiness, could
fail to give these principles the preference over others practically
as good.

If it could be shown, for instance, that monarchy was as apt, in a
given case, to secure the public well-being as some other
form of government, monarchy should be preferred, and would
undoubtedly be established, on account of its imaginative and
dramatic superiority. But if, blinded by this somewhat ethereal
advantage, a party sacrificed to it important public interests, the
injustice would be manifest. In a doubtful case, a nation decides,
not without painful conflicts, how much it will sacrifice to its
sentimental needs. The important point is to remember that the
representative or practical value of a principle is one thing, and its
intrinsic or aesthetic value is another, and that the latter can be
justly counted only as an item in its favour to be weighed; against
possible external disadvantages. Whenever this comparison and
balancing of ultimate benefits of every kind is angrily dismissed in
favour of some absolute principle, laid down in contempt of human
misery and happiness, we have a personal and fantastic system of
ethics, without practical sanctions. It is an evidence that the
superstitious imagination has invaded the sober and practical
domain of morals.

_Aesthetic and physical pleasure._

Sec. 7. We have now separated with some care intellectual and moral
judgments from the sphere of our subject, and found that we are to
deal only with perceptions of value, and with these only when they
are positive and immediate. But even with these distinctions the
most remarkable characteristic of the sense of beauty remains
undefined. All pleasures are intrinsic and positive values, but all
pleasures are not perceptions of beauty. Pleasure is indeed the
essence of that perception, but there is