In a very curious manner, therefore, has Mr Ruskin selected his materials from the two rival schools of metaphysics. His _Æsthesis_ is an intuitive perception, but of a mere sensual or animal nature--sometimes almost confounded with the mere pleasure of sense, at other times advanced into considerable importance, as where he has to explain the fact that men of very little piety have a very acute perception of beauty. His _Theoria_ is, and can be, nothing more than the results of human reason in its highest and noblest exercise, rapidly brought before the mind by a habitual association of ideas. For the lowest element of the beautiful he runs to the school of intuitions;--they will not thank him for the compliment;--for the higher to that analytic school, and that theory of association of ideas, to which throughout he is ostensibly opposed. This _Theoria_ divides itself into two parts. We shall quote Mr Ruskin's own words and take care to quote from them passages where he seems most solicitous to be accurate and explanatory:-- "The first thing, then, we have to do," he says, "is accurately to discriminate and define those appearances from which we are about to reason as belonging to beauty, properly so called, and to clear the ground of all the confused ideas and erroneous theories with which the misapprehension or metaphorical use of the term has encumbered it. "By the term Beauty, then, properly are signified two things: first, that external quality of bodies, already so often spoken of, and which, whether it occur in a stone, flower, beast, or in man, is absolutely identical--which, as I have already asserted, may be shown to be in some sort typical of the Divine attributes, and which, therefore, I shall, for distinction's sake, call Typical Beauty; and, secondarily, the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of functions in living things, more especially of the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man--and this kind of beauty I shall call Vital Beauty."--(P. 26.)