Is it not an incontestable fact that before certain objects, under very different circumstances, we pronounce the following judgment:--This object is beautiful? This affirmation is not always explicit. Sometimes it manifests itself only by a cry of admiration; sometimes it silently rises in the mind that scarcely has a consciousness of it. The forms of this phenomenon vary, but the phenomenon is attested by the most common and most certain observation, and all languages bear witness of it. Although sensible objects, with most men, oftenest provoke the judgment of the beautiful, they do not alone possess this advantage; the domain of beauty is more extensive than the domain of the physical world exposed to our view; it has no bounds but those of entire nature, and of the soul and genius of man. Before an heroic action, by the remembrance of a great sacrifice; even by the thought of the most abstract truths firmly united with each other in a system admirable at once for its simplicity and its productiveness; finally, before objects of another order, before the works of art, this same phenomenon is produced in us. We recognize in all these objects, however different, a common quality in regard to which our judgment is pronounced, and this quality we call beauty. The philosophy of sensation, in faithfulness to itself, should have attempted to reduce the beautiful to the agreeable. Without doubt, beauty is almost always agreeable to the senses, or at least it must not wound them. Most of our ideas of the beautiful come to us by sight and hearing, and all the arts, without exception, are addressed to the soul through the body. An object which makes us suffer, were it the most beautiful in the world, very rarely appears to us such. Beauty has little influence over a soul occupied with grief. But if an agreeable sensation often accompanies the idea of the beautiful, we must not conclude that one is the other. Experience testifies that all agreeable things do not appear beautiful, and that, among agreeable things, those which are most so are not the most beautiful,--a sure sign that the agreeable is not the beautiful; for if one is identical with the other, they should never be separated, but should always be commensurate with each other.