mechanical science has made progress, the
inclusion of emotional or passionate elements in the concept of the
reality would be now an extravagance. Here our idea of things is
composed exclusively of perceptual elements, of the ideas of form
and of motion.

The beauty of objects, however, forms an exception to this rule.
Beauty is an emotional element, a pleasure of ours, which
nevertheless we regard as a quality of things. But we are now
prepared to understand the nature of this exception. It is the
survival of a tendency originally universal to make every effect of
a thing upon us a constituent of its conceived nature. The scientific
idea of a thing is a great abstraction from the mass of perceptions
and reactions which that thing produces the aesthetic idea is less
abstract, since it retains the emotional reaction, the pleasure of the
perception, as an integral part of the conceived thing.

Nor is it hard to find the ground of this survival in the sense of
beauty of an objectification of feeling elsewhere extinct. Most of
the pleasures which objects cause are easily distinguished and
separated from the perception of the object: the object has to be
applied to a particular organ, like the palate, or swallowed like
wine, or used and operated upon in some way before the pleasure
arises. The cohesion is therefore slight between the pleasure and
the other associated elements of sense; the pleasure is separated in
time from the perception, or it is localized in a different organ, and
consequently is at once recognized as an effect and not as a quality
of the object. But when the process of perception itself is pleasant,
as it may easily be, when the intellectual operation, by which the
elements of sense are associated and projected, and the concept of
the form and substance of the thing produced, is naturally
delightful, then we have a pleasure intimately bound up in the
thing, inseparable from its character and constitution, the seat of
which in us is the same as the seat of the perception. We naturally
fail, under these circumstances, to separate the pleasure from the
other objectified feelings. It becomes, like them, a quality of the
object, which we distinguish from pleasures not so incorporated in
the perception of things, by giving it the name of beauty.

_The definition of beauty._

Sec. 11. We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the
terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the concepti