The sensibility which yields to success, or which produces it, is very interesting; but perhaps it will be permitted not to despise entirely, and at very first sight, the sensibility which opposes success and denies that the successful work is, as such, the beautiful work. These two sensibilities, though equally spontaneous, are not equally pure. The second is very mixed. The aesthetic which sums it up--an aesthetic as fragile as morality--is a mixture of beliefs, of traditions, of arguments, of habits, of conceptions. Respect enters into it--also fear and an obscure appetite for novelty. "On new thoughts let us make old verses." The new-old--that is what all aesthetics extol, for a caste must be flattered in keeping with its nerves and its erudition. The artist's judgment, in artistic matters, is an amalgam of sensations and superstitions. The simple-minded crowd has merely sensations. Its judgment is not aesthetic. It is not even a judgment. It is the naïve avowal of a pleasure. It follows necessarily from this that the aesthetic caste alone is qualified to judge the beauty of works, and to accord them this quality. The crowd creates success, the caste creates beauty. It is all the same, if you like, since there is a hierarchy neither in acts nor in sensations, and all is but movement. It is the same, but it is different. There, then, is one point established. In art, the opinion of the intelligence is opposed to the opinion of sensibility. Sensibility is concerned only with pleasure. If, to this pleasure, an intellectual element be added, we have aesthetics. The crowd can say: that pleases me, hence it is beautiful. It cannot say: that pleases me, yet it is not beautiful, or: that displeases me, yet it is beautiful. The crowd, as such, never lies; while aesthetic judgment is one of the most complicated forms of falsehood.[3] It is very evident that absolute beauty exists no more than truth, justice, love. The beauty of the poets, the truth of the philosophers, the justice of the sociologists, the love of the theologians, are all so many abstractions which enter the realm of our senses--and very clumsily--only when blocked out by the sculptor's chisel. Like ideas conceived in the future or in the past, they express a certain harmony between our present sensations and the general state of our intelligence. This is especially felt in the case of truth, which is indeed a sensation uncontradicted by our intelligence; but any other intelligence may contradict it, or it may find itself contradicted by sensations of a different order or intensity.