THE NATURE OF BEAUTY

EVERY introduction to the problems of aesthetics begins by
acknowledging the existence and claims of two methods of
attack,--the general, philosophical, deductive, which starts
from a complete metaphysics and installs beauty in its place
among the other great concepts; and the empirical, or inductive,
which seeks to disengage a general principle of beauty from
the objects of aesthetic experience and the facts of aesthetic
enjoyment: Fechner's "aesthetics from above and from below."

The first was the method of aesthetics par excellence. It was
indeed only through the desire of an eighteenth-century
philosopher, Baumgarten, to round out his "architectonic" of
metaphysics that the science received its name, as designating
the theory of knowledge in the form of feeling, parallel to
that of "clear," logical thought. Kant, Schelling, and Hegel,
again, made use of the concept of the Beautiful as a kind of
keystone or cornice for their respective philosophical edifices.
Aesthetics, then, came into being as the philosophy of the
Beautiful, and it may be asked why this philosophical aesthetics
does not suffice--why beauty should need for its understanding
also an aesthetics "von unten."

The answer is not that no system of philosophy is universally
accepted, but that the general aesthetic theories have not, as
yet at least, succeeded in answering the plain questions of
"the plain man" in regard to concrete beauty. Kant, indeed,
frankly denied that the explanation of concrete beauty, or
"Doctrine of Taste," as he called it, was possible, while the