That, in detecting an imposture of this kind, admiration would give place to disgust, only proves that the external qualities which were admired were the natural and appropriate signs of the internal qualities expected to be found under them, and that they now cease to interest only because they have become, not naturally less the signs of these qualities, but because they have by a mere trick been rendered insignificant, because truth and nature have been violated, and because the mind feels only disgust at the imposture. I cannot help saying that if Knight was in earnest when he framed such arguments, his mind was sometimes dull as well as perverse. "The redness of any morbid inflammation," he says, "may display a gradation of teint, which, in a pink or a rose, we should think as beautiful as 'the purple light of love and bloom of young desire;' and the cadaverous paleness of death or disease, a degree of whiteness, which, in a piece of marble or alabaster, we should deem to be as pure, as that of the most delicate skin of the fairest damsel of the frigid zone: consequently, the mere visible beauty is in both the same; and the difference consists entirely in mental sympathies, excited by certain internal stimuli, and guided by habit." There is here the same confusion of heterogeneous and inconsistent objects, as in the preceding cases. To judge of beauty in simple objects, each quality may be separately considered; and in this view, if the inflammation presented the same teint as the pink or the rose, then, as a mere teint, abstracted from every other quality of the respective objects, it would be precisely as beautiful in the one as in the other; but as the color of a rose on the human body would indicate that flow of blood to the skin which can result only from excessive action, it ceases to be considered intrinsically, and is regarded only as a sign of disease. The same observations are applicable to the other case here adduced. "The African black," he says, "when he first beholds an European complexion, thinks both its red and white morbid and unnatural, and of course disgusting. His sunburnt beauties express their modesty and sensibility by variations in the sable teints of their countenances, which are equally attractive to him, as the most delicate blush of red to us."