Sense of Beauty

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY George Santayana Based on the text originally published in 1896 The Santayana Edition www.iupui.edu/~santedit/sant/ PREFACE THIS little work contains the chief ideas gathered together for a course of lectures on the theory and history of æsthetics 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 sin- cerity 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 ap- plication to a complex subject of the principles acknowledged to obtain in our simple judgments. My effort throughout has been to recall those fundamental æsthetic 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 con- troversy 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, 1896. 3 INTRODUCTION THE sense of beauty has a more important place in life than æsthetic 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 civilised ages, an amount of effort, genius, and honour, little inferior to that given to industry, war, or religion. The fine arts, however, where æsthetic feel- ing 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 manufac- tures; nor does man select his dwelling, his clothes, or his companions without reference to their effect on his æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 comprehen- sion 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 ha- bitual 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 inter- 5 6 The Sense of Beauty Introduction 7 preted æsthetic facts in the light of their metaphysical principles, and made of interests, of which the knowledge of truth is one, but one only; and the human their theory of taste a corollary or foot-note to their systems; and that group judgments and opinions which are truly of little importance are those that in which artists and critics have ventured into philosophic ground, by gener- wander beyond the range of moral economy, or have no function in ordering alising somewhat the maxims of the craft or the comments of the sensitive and enriching the mind. The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the observer. A treatment of the subject at once direct and theoretic has been very commentaries they provoke. rare: the problems of nature and morals have attracted the reasoners, and the Both ethics and æsthetics have suffered much from the prejudice against description and creation of beauty have absorbed the artists; between the two the subjective. They have not suffered more because both have a subject- reflection upon æsthetic experience has remained abortive or incoherent. matter which is partly objective. Ethics deals with conduct as much as with A circumstance that has also contributed to the absence or to the failure emotion, and therefore considers the causes of events and their consequences of æsthetic speculation is the subjectivity of the phenomenon with which it as well as our judgments of their value. Æsthetics also is apt to include the deals. Man has a prejudice against himself: anything which is a product of history and philosophy of art, and to add much descriptive and critical matter his mind seems to him to be unreal or comparatively insignificant. We are to the theory of our susceptibility to beauty. A certain confusion is thereby in- satisfied only when we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and laws inde- troduced into these inquiries, but at the same time the discussion is enlivened pendent of our nature. The ancients long speculated about the constitution of by excursions into neighbouring provinces, perhaps more interesting to the the universe before they became aware of that mind which is the instrument general reader. of all speculation. The moderns, also, even within the field of psychology, We may, however, distinguish three distinct elements of ethics and æs- have studied first the function of perception and the theory of knowledge, by thetics, and three different ways of approaching the subject. The first is the which we seem to be informed about external things; they have in comparison exercise of the moral or æsthetic faculty itself, the actual pronouncing of judg- neglected the exclusively subjective and human department of imagination ment and giving of praise, blame, and precept. This is not a matter of science and emotion. We have still to recognise in practice that from our despised feel- but of character, enthusiasm, niceness of perception, and fineness of emotion. ings the great world of perception derives all its value. Things are interesting It is æsthetic or moral activity, while ethics and æsthetics, as sciences, are because we care about them, and important because we need them. Had our intellectual activities, having that æsthetic or moral activity for their subject- perceptions no connexion with our pleasures, we should soon close our eyes matter. on this world; if our intelligence were of no service to our passions, we should The second method consists in the historical explanation of conduct or come to doubt, in the lazy freedom of reverie, whether two and two make four. of art as a part of anthropology, and seeks to discover the conditions of vari- Yet so strong is the popular sense of the unworthiness and insignificance ous types of character, forms of polity, conceptions of justice, and schools of of things purely emotional, that those who have taken moral problems to heart criticism and of art. Of this nature is a great deal of what has been written on and felt their dignity have often been led into attempts to discover some ex- æsthetics. The philosophy of art has often proved a more tempting subject ternal right and beauty of which our moral and æsthetic feelings should be than the psychology of taste, especially to minds which were not so much perceptions or discoveries, just as our intellectual activity is a perception or fascinated by beauty itself as by the curious problem of the artistic instinct in discovery of external fact. These philosophers seem to feel that unless moral man and of the diversity of its manifestations in history. and æsthetic judgments are expressions of objective truth, and not merely The third method in ethics and æsthetics is psychological, as the other expressions of human nature, they stand condemned of hopeless triviality. A two are respectively didactic and historical. It deals with moral and æsthet- judgment is not trivial, however, because it rests on human feelings; on the ic judgments as phenomena of mind and products of mental evolution. The contrary, triviality consists in abstraction from human problem here is to understand the origin and conditions of these feelings and their relation to the rest of our economy. Such an inquiry, if pursued success- fully, would yield an understanding of the reason why we think anything right or beauti- 8 The Sense of Beauty Introduction 9 ful, wrong or ugly; it would thus reveal the roots of conscience and taste in We shall therefore study human sensibility itself and our actual feelings human nature and enable us to distinguish transitory preferences and ideals, about beauty, and we shall look for no deeper, unconscious causes of our æs- which rest on peculiar conditions, from those which, springing from those thetic consciousness. Such value as belongs to metaphysical derivations of the elements of mind which all men share, are comparatively permanent and uni- nature of the beautiful, comes to them not because they explain our primary versal.

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