and less
just, we might be more efficient. If our appreciation were less
general, it might be more real, and if we trained our imagination
into exclusiveness, it might attain to character.

_The differentia of aesthetic pleasure: its objectification._

Sec. 10. There is, however, something more in the claim to
universality in aesthetic judgments than the desire to generalize our
own opinions. There is the expression of a curious but well-known
psychological phenomenon, viz., the transformation of an element
of sensation into the quality of a thing. If we say that other men
should see the beauties we see, it is because _we_ think those
beauties _are in the object,_ like its colour, proportion, or size. Our
judgment appears to us merely the perception and discovery of an
external existence, of the real excellence that is without. But this
notion is radically absurd and contradictory. Beauty, as we have
seen, is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence
which affects our senses and which we consequently perceive. It
exists in perception, and cannot exist otherwise. A beautynot
perceived is a pleasure not felt, and a contradiction. But modern
philosophy has taught us to say the same thing of every element of
the perceived world; all are sensations; and their grouping into
objects imagined to be permanent and external is the work of
certain habits of our intelligence. We should be incapable of
surveying or retaining the diffused experiences of life, unless we
organized and classified them, and out of the chaos of impressions
framed the world of conventional and recognizable objects.

How this is done is explained by the current theories of perception.
External objects usually affect various senses at once, the
impressions of which are thereby associated. Repeated experiences
of one object are also associated on account of their similarity;
hence a double tendency to merge and unify into a single percept,
to which a name is attached, the group of those memories and
reactions which in fact had one external thing for their cause. But
this percept, once formed, is clearly different from those particular
experiences out of which it grew. It is permanent, they are variable.
They are but partial views and glimpses of it. The constituted
notion therefore comes to be the reality, and the materials of it
merely the appearance. The distinction between substance and
quality, reality and appearance, matter and mind