has the right to dispose of it arbitrarily, and when we say: this is true, this is beautiful, it is no longer the particular and variable impression of our sensibility that we express, it is the absolute judgment that reason imposes on all men. Confound reason and sensibility, reduce the idea of the beautiful to the sensation of the agreeable, and taste no longer has a law. If a person says to me, in the presence of the Apollo Belvidere, that he feels nothing more agreeable than in presence of any other statue, that it does not please him at all, that he does not feel its beauty, I cannot dispute his impression; but if this person thence concludes that the Apollo is not beautiful, I proudly contradict him, and declare that he is deceived. Good taste is distinguished from bad taste; but what does this distinction signify, if the judgment of the beautiful is resolved into a sensation? You say to me that I have no taste. What does that mean? Have I not senses like you? Does not the object which you admire act upon me as well as upon you? Is not the impression which I feel as real as that which you feel? Whence comes it, then, that you are right,--you who only give expression to the impression which you feel, and that I am wrong,--I who do precisely the same thing? Is it because those who feel like you are more numerous than those who feel like me? But here the number of voices means nothing? The beautiful being defined as that which produces on the senses an agreeable impression, a thing that pleases a single man, though it were frightfully ugly in the eyes of all the rest of the human race, must, nevertheless, and very legitimately, be called beautiful by him who receives from it an agreeable impression, for, so far as he is concerned, it satisfies the definition. There is, then, no true beauty; there are only relative and changing beauties, beauties of circumstance, custom, fashion, and all these beauties, however different, will have a right to the same respect, provided they meet sensibilities to which they are agreeable. And as there is nothing in this world, in the infinite diversity of our dispositions, which may not please some one, there will be nothing that is not beautiful; or, to speak more truly, there will be nothing either beautiful or ugly, and the Hottentot Venus will equal the Venus de Medici. The absurdity of the consequences demonstrates the absurdity of the principle. But there is only one means of escaping these consequences, which is to repudiate the principle, and recognize the judgment of the beautiful as an absolute judgment, and, as such, entirely different from sensation.