ABSTRACT
Kant, in his Critique of the Aesthetic Judgement, tells people that a 'free play' of the imagination, the faculty of assembling the manifold of intuition, and the understanding, which is the faculty of uniting representations by means of a concept. A process essential to any and every act of cognition precedes and causes the feeling of aesthetic pleasure and lends universality to the judgment of taste. For Herbert Spencer aesthetic activity is in essence a kind of play, because 'the activities that people call play are united with the aesthetic activities by the trait that neither subserve, the processes conducive to life'. The sentiment of beauty consists of pleasure derived from sensation, perception, always on the condition of complete severance from the biological functions of the human organism. According to K. Lange, art is the acquired capacity of man to provide others with a pleasure, free from any practical interest, and derived from a deliberate and conscious self-deception.
