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That small amount of intrinsic beauty on which to graft the beauty of the second term is, therefore, not a necessary condition, so that we are left, on Professor Santayana's theory, with the strange paradox of so-called beautiful objects which are, nevertheless, confessedly ugly. What, then, is the flaw in this definition?
The modern world, which was our generation, would seem to be cut off from all that preceded it as with a descending knife. It was precisely from "the sense of tragedy" that we had been emancipated: from the "agonized conscience," I should undoubtedly have said, had I been acquainted then with Mr. Santayana's later phrase.
K. Gordon's Aesthetics, E. D. Puffer's Psychology of Beauty, Santayana's Sense of Beauty, Raymond's Genesis of Art Form, and Arthur Symons's Seven Arts, are stimulating books.
The passionate youth must speak in the vein of the Knight in Santayana's poem: "As the gaudy shadows Stalked by me which men take for beauteous things, I laughed to scorn each feeble counterfeit, And cried to the sweet image in my soul, How much more bright thou wast and beautiful." Normal friendships with pure girls are vitally necessary for a man, and comradeship with men important for women.
Nor can we agree with Santayana's dictum<1> that philosophical aesthetics confuses the import of an experience with the explanation of its cause. It need not. The aesthetic experience is indeed caused by the beautiful object, but the beautiful object itself is caused by the possibility of the aesthetic experience, beauty as an end under the conditions of human perception.
The modern world, which was our generation, would seem to be cut off from all that preceded it as with a descending knife. It was precisely from "the sense of tragedy" that we had been emancipated: from the "agonized conscience," I should undoubtedly have said, had I been acquainted then with Mr. Santayana's later phrase.
The modern world, which was our generation, would seem to be cut off from all that preceded it as with a descending knife. It was precisely from "the sense of tragedy" that we had been emancipated: from the "agonized conscience," I should undoubtedly have said, had I been acquainted then with Mr. Santayana's later phrase.
But yet, it might be said that the content of beauty might conceivably be deduced from the psychological conditions of absorption. In the same way, Santayana's "Beauty as objectified pleasure," or pleasure as the quality of a thing, is neither a determination of objective beauty nor a sufficient description of the psychological state.
Last, my machete, my pearl of destructiveness. It was his, my Santayana's; he procured it from Toledo, from the master sword-maker of the universe. The blade is so fine, the eye refuses to tell where it melts into the air; a touch, and the hardest substance is divided exactly in two pieces.
No one will deny that the full aesthetic experience cannot be dismissed with the treatment of formal beauty; and, although Professor Santayana's "beauty in the second term" may be rejected as a pure individual, arbitrary, interested, and hence unaesthetic element, the explicit content of a work of art cannot be ignored.
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