n written are rather
too general and pervasive to admit of specification; yet the student
of philosophy will not fail to perceive how much I owe to writers,
both living and dead, to whom no honour could be added by my
acknowledgments. I have usually omitted any reference to them in
foot-notes or in the text, in order that the air of controversy might
be avoided, and the reader might be enabled to compare what is
said more directly with the reality of his own experience.

G. S.
September, 1906.

INTRODUCTION

The sense of beauty has a more important place in life than
aesthetic theory has ever taken in philosophy. The plastic arts, with
poetry and music, are the most conspicuous monuments of this
human interest, because they appeal only to contemplation, and yet
have attracted to their service, in all civilized ages, an amount of
effort, genius, and honour, little inferior to that given to industry,
war, or religion. The fine arts, however, where aesthetic feeling
appears almost pure, are by no means the only sphere in which
men show their susceptibility to beauty. In all products of human
industry we notice the keenness with which the eye is attracted to
the mere appearance of things: great sacrifices of time and labour
are made to it in the most vulgar manufactures; nor does man
select his dwelling, his clothes, or his companions without
reference to their effect on his aesthetic senses. Of late we have
even learned that the forms of many animals are due to the survival
by sexual selection of the colours and forms most attractive to the
eye. There must therefore be in our nature a very radical and
wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of
the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so
conspicuous a faculty.

That aesthetic theory has received so little attention from the world
is not due to the unimportance of the subject of which it treats, but
rather to lack of an adequate motive for speculating upon it, and to
the small success of the occasional efforts to deal with it. Absolute
curiosity, and love of comprehension for its own sake, are not
passions we have much leisure to indulge: they require not only
freedom from affairs but, what is more rare, freedom from
prepossessions and from the hatred of all ideas that do not make
for the habitual goal of our thought.

Now, what has chiefly maintained such speculation as the world
has seen has be