ABSTRACT
It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than about anything else: the literature of the subject is not large enough for that. Without sensibility a man can have no aesthetic experience, and theories not based on broad and deep aesthetic experience are worthless. People who respond immediately and surely to works of art, though more enviable than men of massive intellect but slight sensibility, are often quite as incapable of talking sense about aesthetics. The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. Though all aesthetic theories must be based on aesthetic judgments, and ultimately all aesthetic judgments must be matters of personal taste, it would be rash to assert that no theory of aesthetics can have general validity. Everyone sometimes uses 'beauty' in an unaesthetic sense. To everyone, except perhaps here and there an occasional aesthete, the commonest sense of the word is unaesthetic.
