Any pleasant psychic element may become an element of an æsthetic complex; and any psychic complex which displays a relative permanency of pleasure is in that fact æsthetic. Our æsthetic states are those in which many pleasant elements are combined to produce a relative permanency of pleasure.
Our 'non-æsthetic pleasures,' so-called, are those states which have been experienced in the past as vividly pleasant, and to which the name, pleasure, has become indissolubly attached; but they are states which do not produce a relatively permanent pleasure in revival, and, correctly speaking, are not pleasures at the moment when they are described as such, and at the same time as 'non-æsthetic.'
I am glad to feel that this view of mine is not discrepant from that of Dr. Santayana, as given in quite different terms in his book entitled The Sense of Beauty. For what is relatively permanent has the quality which I call 'realness'; and that in experience which has realness we tend to objectify. Hence it is quite natural to find Dr. Santayana defining beauty as 'objectified pleasure.'
You will not blame me, I believe, for thinking that my own definition cuts down closer to the root of the matter than Dr. Santayana's.
But if this theory of mine is found wanting, the æsthetician will not cease to call upon the psychologist for some other which shall meet the demands of introspection; and which shall accord with our experience of the sense of beauty, which in all its wealth of impression the æsthetician offers to the psychologist as data for the laborious study asked of him.
Before leaving this subject, I may perhaps be allowed to call attention to the fact that the theoretical view which places the essence of the sense of beauty in pleasure-getting, if it prove to be true, is not without such practical applications as are so properly demanded in our time. For if this view is correct, it teaches to the critic a lesson of sympathetic tolerance, for he learns from it that the sources from which the sense of beauty is derived differ very markedly in people of diverse types; and it warns him also against the danger of an artificial limitation of his own æs-
