aesthetic task; to analyze the workings of the poet's mind,
as his conception grows and ramifies and brightens, is no part
of it, because such a study takes no account of the aesthetic
value of the process, but only of the process itself. The
same fallacy lurks here, indeed, as in the confusion of the
scientific critic between literary evolution and poetic
achievement, and the test of the fallacy is this single fact:
the psychological process in the development of a dramatic
idea, for instance, is, and quite properly should be, from
the point of view of such analysis, exactly the same for a
Shakespeare and for the Hoyt of our American farces.

The cause of the production of a work of art may indeed by
found by tracing back the stream of thought; but the cause
of its beauty is the desire and the sense of beauty in the
human heart. If a given combination of lines and colors is
beautiful, then the anticipation of the combination as
beautiful is what has brought about its incarnation. The
artist's attitude toward his vision of beauty, and the art
lover's toward that vision realized, are the same. The only
legitimate aesthetic analysis is, then, that of the relation
between the aesthetic object and the lover of beauty, and all
the studies in the psychology of invention--be it literary,
scientific, or practical invention--have no right to the
other name.

Aesthetics, then, is the science of beauty. It will be
developed as a system of laws expressing the relation between
the object and aesthetic pleasure in it; or as a system of
conditions to which the object, in order to be beautiful,