The Sense of Beauty - George Santayana (best short books to read .txt) 📗

[Note:  for this online edition I have moved the Table of Contents to the beginning of the text and slightly modified it to conform with the online format. I have also made one spelling change:  "ominiscient intelligence" to "omniscient intelligence".]

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

BEING THE OUTLINES OF AESTHETIC THEORY

by

GEORGE SANTAYANA

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON

COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Printed in the United States of America



CONTENTS

  Preface      Introduction — The Methods of Aesthetics 1-13         Part I. — The Nature of Beauty   § 1.   The philosophy of beauty is a theory of values   14 § 2.   Preference is ultimately irrational   18 § 3.   Contrast between moral and aesthetic values   28 § 4.   Work and play   25 § 5.   All values are in one sense aesthetic   28 § 6.   Aesthetic consecration of general principles   31 § 7.   Contrast of aesthetic and physical pleasures   35 § 8.   The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its disinterestedness   37 § 9.   The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its universality   40 § 10.   The differential of aesthetic pleasure:  its objectification   44 § 11.   The definition of beauty   49         Part II. — The Materials of Beauty   § 12.   All human functions may contribute to the sense of beauty   53 § 13.   The influence of the passion of love   56 § 14.   Social instincts and their aesthetic influence   62 § 15.   The lower senses   65 § 16.   Sound   68 § 17.   Colour   72 § 18.   Materials surveyed   76         Part III. — Form   § 19.   There is a beauty of form   82 § 20.   Physiology of the perception of form   85 § 21.   Values of geometrical figures  88 § 22.   Symmetry  91 § 23.   Form the unity of a manifold  95 § 24.   Multiplicity in uniformity  97 § 25.   Example of the stars  100 § 26.   Defects of pure multiplicity  106 § 27.   Aesthetics of democracy  110 § 28.   Values of types and values of examples  112 § 29.   Origin of types  116 § 30.   The average modified in the direction of pleasure  121 § 31.   Are all things beautiful?  126 § 32.   Effects of indeterminate form  131 § 33.   Example of landscape  133 § 34.   Extensions to objects usually not regarded aesthetically  138 § 35.   Further dangers of indeterminateness  142 § 36.   The illusion of infinite perfection  146 § 37.   Organized nature the source of apperceptive forms  152 § 38.   Utility the principle of organization in nature  155 § 39.   The relation of utility to beauty  157 § 40.   Utility the principle of organization in the arts  160 § 41.   Form and adventitious ornament  163 § 42.   Syntactical form  167 § 42.   Literary form.  The plot  171 § 44.   Character as an aesthetic form  174 § 45.   Ideal characters  176 § 46.   The religious imagination  180 § 47.   Preference is ultimately irrational  185         Part IV. — Expression   § 48.   Expression defined  192 § 49.   The associative process  198 § 50.   Kinds of value in the second term  201 § 51.   Aesthetic value in the second term  205 § 52.   Practical value in the same  208 § 53.   Cost as an element of effect  211 § 54.   The expression of economy and fitness  214 § 55.   The authority of morals over aesthetics  218 § 56.   Negative values in the second term  221 § 57.   Influence of the first term in the pleasing expression of evil  226 § 58.   Mixture of other expressions, including that of truth  228 § 59.   The liberation of self  233 § 60.   The sublime independent of the expression of evil  239 § 61.   The comic  245 § 62.   Wit  250 § 63.   Humour  253 § 64.   The grotesque  256 § 65.   The possibility of finite perfection  258 § 66.   The stability of the ideal  263       § 67.   Conclusion 266-270   Footnotes     Index 271-275

PREFACE

This little work contains the chief ideas gathered together for a course of lectures on the theory and history of aesthetics given at Harvard College from 1892 to 1895. The only originality I can claim is that which may result from the attempt to put together the scattered commonplaces of criticism into a system, under the inspiration of a naturalistic psychology. I have studied sincerity rather than novelty, and if any subject, as for instance the excellence of tragedy, is presented in a new light, the change consists only in the stricter application to a complex subject of the principles acknowledged to obtain in our simple judgments. My effort throughout has been to recall those fundamental aesthetic feelings the orderly extension of which yields sanity of judgment and distinction of taste.

The influences under which the book has been written are rather too general and pervasive to admit of specification; yet the student of philosophy will not fail to perceive how much I owe to writers, both living and dead, to whom no honour could be added by my acknowledgments. I have usually omitted any reference to them in foot-notes or in the text, in order that the air of controversy might be avoided, and the reader might be enabled to compare what is said more directly with the reality of his own experience.

          G. S.
     September, 1906.

INTRODUCTION

The sense of beauty has a more important place in life than aesthetic theory has ever taken in philosophy. The plastic arts, with poetry and music, are the most conspicuous monuments of this human interest, because they appeal only to contemplation, and yet have attracted to their service, in all civilized ages, an amount of effort, genius, and honour, little inferior to that given to industry, war, or religion. The fine arts, however, where aesthetic feeling appears almost pure, are by no means the only sphere in which men show their susceptibility to beauty. In all products of human industry we notice the keenness with which the eye is attracted to the mere appearance of things: great sacrifices of time and labour are made to it in the most vulgar manufactures; nor does man select his dwelling, his clothes, or his companions without reference to their effect on his aesthetic senses. Of late we have even learned that the forms of many animals are due to the survival by sexual selection of the colours and forms most attractive to the eye. There must therefore be in our nature a very radical and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.

That aesthetic theory has received so little attention from the world is not due to the unimportance of the subject of which it treats, but rather to lack of an adequate motive for speculating upon it, and to the small success of the occasional efforts to deal with it. Absolute curiosity, and love of comprehension for its own sake, are not passions we have much leisure to indulge: they require not only freedom from affairs but, what is more rare, freedom from prepossessions and from the hatred of all ideas that do not make for the habitual goal of our thought.

Now, what has chiefly maintained such speculation as the world has seen has been either theological passion or practical use. All we find, for example, written about beauty may be divided into two groups: that group of writings in which philosophers have interpreted aesthetic facts in the light of their metaphysical principles, and made of their theory of taste a corollary or footnote to their systems; and that group in which artists and critics have ventured into philosophic ground, by generalizing somewhat the maxims of the craft or the comments of the sensitive observer. A treatment of the subject at once direct and theoretic has been very rare: the problems of nature and morals have attracted the reasoners, and the description and creation of beauty have absorbed the artists; between the two reflection upon aesthetic experience has remained abortive or incoherent.

A circumstance that has also contributed to the absence or to the failure of aesthetic speculation is the subjectivity of the phenomenon with which it deals. Man has a prejudice against himself: anything which is a product of his mind seems to him to be unreal or comparatively insignificant. We are satisfied only when we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and laws independent of our nature. The ancients long speculated about the constitution of the universe before they became aware of that mind which is the instrument of all speculation. The moderns, also, even within the field of psychology, have studied first the function of perception and the theory of knowledge, by which we seem to be informed about external things; they have in comparison neglected the exclusively subjective and human department of imagination and emotion. We have still to recognize in practice the truth that from these despised feelings of ours the great world of perception derives all its value, if not also its existence. Things are interesting because we care about them, and important because we need them. Had our perceptions no connexion with our pleasures, we should soon close our eyes on this world; if our intelligence were of no service to our passions, we should come to doubt, in the lazy freedom of reverie, whether two and two make four.

Yet so strong is the popular sense of the unworthiness and insignificance of things purely emotional, that those who have taken moral problems to heart and felt their dignity have often been led into attempts to discover some external right and beauty of which, our moral and aesthetic feelings should be perceptions or discoveries, just as our intellectual activity is, in men's opinion, a perception or discovery of external fact. These philosophers seem to feel that unless moral and aesthetic judgments are expressions of objective truth, and not merely expressions of human nature, they stand condemned of hopeless triviality. A judgment is not trivial, however, because it rests on human feelings; on the contrary, triviality consists in abstraction from human interests; only those judgments and opinions are truly insignificant which wander beyond the reach of verification, and have no function in the ordering and enriching of life.

Both ethics and aesthetics have suffered much from the prejudice against the subjective. They have not suffered more because both have a subject-matter which is partly objective. Ethics deals with conduct as much as with emotion, and therefore considers the causes of events and their consequences as well as our judgments of their value. Esthetics also is apt to