Some have asserted that esthetic enjoyment belongs to a special power apart from both knowledge and appetite. There is however no need of such power. Certainly beauty must be known to be enjoyed, but is not the knowledge itself adequate to produce the characteristic effect of beauty? Is not Aquinas right in saying, “Pulchrum dicitur id cujus ipsa apprehensio placet” (that is called beautiful which simply by its perception pleases)? Good, being an end, cannot delight solely by being perceived; good must be attained. But for beauty, is not its very perception an enjoyment? The solution of this question will be found in the nature of enjoyment. Emotions and feelings, pleasure and pain are easy to understand and for that reason difficult to express in satisfactory formulas. By its very nature every faculty of man operating normally has an accompanying pleasure, while if operating abnormally it has pain. The faculty itself is therefore the subject of the feeling just as life is inherent in the organism. Indeed feeling is consciously localized life. The feeling of the toe is felt by the toe; the joy of seeing is felt by the eye. No distinct power is required to carry the feeling. So it is with esthetic emotions. The mind itself feels the delight of beauty. Esthetic enjoyment is a function of perception. Does esthetic enjoyment belong to the senses and to the imagination? Here again there is difference of opinion. It is probable, however, that sensible perception has no accompanying esthetic pleasure. St. Augustine appealed to experience and declared that esthetic enjoyment of the beauty, say, of the sun, was possible, even when the sight suffered pain. A better reason may be found in the behavior of animals which, though clothed in beauty, give us no certain evidence of esthetic appreciation and enjoyment. Esthetic enjoyment therefore belongs to intellectual cognition. Now the intellect has many operations. Which one of these carries the esthetic pleasure or esthetic pain, which one is charged with the vital thrill that creates and appreciates the world of art? The mind reasons, the mind judges, the mind apprehends. Esthetic enjoyment belongs to the last. Judgments and inferences may be objects of esthetic enjoyment; to reason, to judge may precede or follow or may be even necessary conditions, but the esthetic act is most probably one of simple apprehension. There would seem to be general agreement that contemplation is the characteristic attitude of the mind in the presence of beauty. Aquinas excludes distinctly the idea of end from beauty. Beauty is a form which we contemplate. Croce calls the esthetic perception intuition. Theodore Watts-Dunton seems to be describing the same act when he calls poetry “the renascence of wonder.” The efforts of reasoning and of judging appear to be alien to the mental attitude in the presence of beauty.