Here, in either case, our ordinary speech hits the nail exactly on the head: “I am not in a receptive mood,” we say. I do not receive what these things have to give. In an appreciative mood I take something from the thing that seems to me beautiful--this act is my intuition--and use it as the basis of my creative work--my expression. I need the presentation of an external object, or its memory, for that creation. Now, as we have just seen, a host of very different objects excite in an individual emotion of beauty in a pre-eminent degree, while if we reckon the objects which excite it in a less acute form, the tale is endless; yet the emotion all excite is sufficiently the same in content, in spite of its multiplicity of form, to be expressed by the single term beauty. One is tempted to speak loosely of this effect of the beautiful on us as an emotion, though clearly it is not one, since it is expression. An emotion may be beautiful immediately it is known and expressed in this act of knowing, but the emotion is not beautiful any more than any other object is beautiful. Nevertheless, this loose usage of the term has one advantage. It draws our attention to the close relationship that binds together beauty and emotion. We have seen elsewhere that in the realm of emotion exists the freedom that lies between the incoming perception and the outgoing activity, forming the bond between the first and last, and determining the form of the response to the stimulus[20]. In the recognition of beauty there is freedom and emotion, as there is in every creative act. But the activity is dependent on stimulus, and every stimulus is primarily perceptual, though not necessarily in the strict sense of being perceived by an organ of sense. The perception may be wholly internal, the self being its own object in introspection[21]; the intuition may be the intuition of love itself. Here we see the origin of the common, yet I believe erroneous, statement that “beauty, as we understand it, is only for sense and for sensuous imagination[22].” If Beauty be the expression of an intuition of Reality, as Croce says, and Reality be ultimately the activity of Personal Being, which activity is relationship, as we have seen reason to claim[23], Beauty is not dependent on sense perception alone. Further, because the activity of personal relation is Love, we see in Beauty the creative knowledge of love, which is necessarily linked in closest intimacy with freedom and emotion. Love is not beautiful; it is simply the activity of relationship. The knowledge of love is Beauty’s very self. The world is not beautiful, but knowledge of the world as the expression of a part of Reality--of that portion of Reality which is limited and determined by the self-abnegation of God’s love--is Beauty. In so far as we merely perceive matter the aesthetic side is in abeyance. At this moment we know, not Reality, but Appearance. Our unaesthetic