ABSTRACT
G. T. Fechner, who has the honour of being the founder of modern scientific aesthetic, treated the newly discovered science of the beautiful as a particular branch of general psychology, or, to be still more exact, as a special department of hedonics, the doctrine of pleasure and pain. His psychological investigations were performed by means of two distinct psychological methods, the method of experiment and control, of which he himself was the absolute originator, and the more usual method of observation and introspection. The most important method of modern scientific aesthetics is essentially experimental, and in this respect it differs from the usual and accepted empirical or inductive approach to the subject; aesthetics cannot be based on the personal aesthetic experience of a philosopher, or on that of a few artistic temperaments, for it should examine and compare systematically the experience of many different individuals.
