ABSTRACT
§1. Clearly underlying the discussion in the last chapter there is a more fundamental problem as to kinds of beauty. There are several conceivable alternatives:
The term beauty or æsthetic experience might be used ambiguously. Our experiences in face of an arabesque and of a tragedy might really have nothing whatever in common except that they were both experiences, and this they would also share with experiences which we do not call æsthetic such as feeling sick or eating a steak. This I think may be dismissed.
There might be two or more kinds of æsthetic experience which differed in some recognizable character though they also had the recognizable common character of being æsthetic; in other words they would be species of a genus, much as scalene triangles differ from isosceles triangles, though both are triangles. If there were two such kinds one might be æsthetically superior to the other.
There might be no distinct kinds of æsthetic experience, though an infinite number of such experiences more or less closely resembling one another; much as there are an infinite number of sizes nearer or farther from one another but no distinguishable kinds of size; in other words æsthetic experience would be an infima species of the genus experience.
