ABSTRACT
§1. Æsthetic experiences seem all to be sense-perceptions or sensuous images with a certain significance, but many experiences which fulfil these two conditions are not æsthetic. Can we say what the nature of the significance must be if they are to deserve the name? Sense-perceptions and memory images are significant of some perceived reality, though they may of course be more or less illusory; but sensa may have no æsthetic quality either favourable or unfavourable, and memory images follow suit. It is generally admitted that the significance of æsthetic experiences is not scientific or historical in the usual sense of those words. A bare narrative, a mathematical equation, a map or a model may give me scientific information if it is correct, but to ask of any æsthetic experience whether it is true of the physical world, now or in the past or future, is irrelevant. A sentence may give me moral or philosophical information, as that we have an obligation not to break our promises or that there are some facts of which knowledge is impossible for the human mind, and it has been held at different times and is still sometimes maintained that æsthetic experiences give us truth about moral or metaphysical facts “in a sensuous form.” This needs elucidation.
