ABSTRACT
The argument here set out may be summarized as follows: Beauty, though we unreflectively ascribe it to things and sensa, cannot really be one of their qualities. We ascribe it to those which have a certain significance or expression for us. But significance or expression is a relation between that which expresses and the mind to which it expresses or which expresses itself in it. There may be a third term in the relation, when one mind expresses or communicates its experiences to another by physical media. But what a natural object or artifact signifies to me must depend on my character and history at least as much as on its own. The reality we are dealing with when we talk of beauty is æsthetic experience. But not all claims to æsthetic experience are justified; they may have degrees of vivacity and purity or may have quite falsely assumed the name. Some people call beautiful what they think true or edifying or useful or sensuously agreeable, and nothing else. This is to have bad taste. Some hardly recognize any beauty. This is to have little taste. The æsthetic experience is to find some perception or sensuous image significant of emotion, not an arbitrary symbol of it, not a mere symptom, nor an inducement of it, but an expression of it, as words can be expressive of thoughts or a smile of affection. And the æsthetic experience is not the expression of thought nor the communication of such expression, nor that of sensation, nor yet that of acts of choice. It is the expression of an emotion in an individual mind; and the communication of this expression to other minds is the work of art, and this needs technique.
