We have made known the beautiful in ourselves, in the faculties that perceive it and appreciate it, in reason, sentiment, imagination, taste; we come, according to the order determined by the method, to other questions: What is the beautiful in objects? What is the beautiful taken in itself? What are its characters and different species? What, in fine, is its first and last principle? All these questions must be treated, and, if possible, solved. Philosophy has its point of departure in psychology; but, in order to attain also its legitimate termination, it must set out from man, and reach things themselves. The history of philosophy offers many theories on the nature of the beautiful: we do not wish to enumerate nor discuss them all; we will designate the most important.[103] There is one very gross, which defines the beautiful as that which pleases the senses, that which procures an agreeable impression. We will not stop at this opinion. We have sufficiently refuted it in showing that it is impossible to reduce the beautiful to the agreeable. A sensualism a little more wise puts the useful in the place of the agreeable, that is to say, changes the form of the same principle. Neither is the beautiful the object which procures for us in the present moment an agreeable but fugitive sensation, it is the object which can often procure for us this same sensation or others similar. No great effort of observation or reasoning is necessary to convince us that utility has nothing to do with beauty. What is useful is not always beautiful. What is beautiful is not always useful, and what is at once useful and beautiful is beautiful for some other reason than its utility. Observe a lever or a pulley: surely nothing is more useful. Nevertheless, you are not tempted to say that this is beautiful. Have you discovered an antique vase admirably worked? You exclaim that this vase is beautiful, without thinking to seek of what use it may be to you. Finally, symmetry and order are beautiful things, and at the same time, are useful things, because they economize space, because objects symmetrically disposed are easier to find when one wants them; but that is not what makes for us the beauty of symmetry, for we immediately seize this kind of beauty, and it is often late enough before we recognize the utility that is found in it. It even sometimes happens, that after having admired the beauty of an object, we are not able to divine its use, although it may have one. The useful is, then, entirely different from the beautiful, far from being its foundation.