er on any imitative, nor any structural,
character; but on some inherent pleasantness in themselves, either of
mere colours to the eye (as of taste to the tongue), or in the placing
of those colours in relations which obey some mental principle of order,
or physical principle of harmony.

11. These abstract relations and inherent pleasantnesses, whether in
space, number, or time, and whether of colours or sounds, form what we
may properly term the musical or harmonic element in every art; and the
study of them is an entirely separate science. It is the branch of
art-philosophy to which the word "aesthetics" should be strictly limited,
being the inquiry into the nature of things that in themselves are
pleasant to the human senses or instincts, though they represent
nothing, and serve for nothing, their only service _being_ their
pleasantness. Thus it is the province of aesthetics to tell you, (if you
did not know it before,) that the taste and colour of a peach are
pleasant, and to ascertain, if it be ascertainable, (and you have any
curiosity to know,) why they are so.

12. The information would, I presume, to most of you, be gratuitous. If
it were not, and you chanced to be in a sick state of body in which you
disliked peaches, it would be, for the time, to you false information,
and, so far as it was true of other people, to you useless. Nearly the
whole study of aesthetics is in like manner either gratuitous or useless.
Either you like the right things without being recommended to do so, or
if you dislike them, your mind cannot be changed by lectures on the laws
of taste. You recollect the story of Thackeray, provoked, as he was
helping himself to strawberries, by a young coxcomb's telling him that
"he never took fruit or sweets." "That" replied, or is said to have
replied, Thackeray, "is because you are a sot, and a glutton." And the
whole science of aesthetics is, in the depth of it, expressed by one
passage of Goethe's in the end of the 2nd part of Faust;--the notable
one that follows the song of the Lemures, when the angels enter to
dispute with the fiends for the soul of Faust. They enter
singing--"Pardon to sinners and life to the dust." Mephistopheles hears
them first, and exclaims to his troop, "Discord I hear, and filthy
jingling"--"Mistoene hoere ich; garstiges Geklimper." This, you see, is
the extreme of bad taste in music. Presently the angelic host begin
strewing roses, which discomfits the diabolic cro