_These Topics reserved for separate Discussion._--These matters deserve a wider and fuller discussion, however, than would here be in place. The ideas under consideration are to be viewed, not merely as conceptions of the reason or intuition, but as constituting the material of two distinct and important departments of mental activity, two distinct classes of judgments, viz., the _æsthetic_ and the _moral_. The conceptions of the beautiful and the right, furnished by the originative or intuitive power of the mind, constitute the material and basis on which the reflective power works, and as thus employed, the mental activity assumes the form, and is known under the familiar names of _taste_ and _conscience_, or, as we may term them, the æsthetic and moral faculties. As such, we reserve them for distinct consideration in the following pages, bearing in mind, as we proceed, that these faculties, so called, are not properly new powers of the mind, but merely forms of the reflective faculty, as exercised upon this particular class of ideas. CHAPTER III. THE CONCEPTION AND COGNIZANCE OF THE BEAUTIFUL § I.--CONCEPTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL. _The Science which treats of this._--The investigation of this topic brings us upon the domain of a science as yet comparatively new, and which, in fact, has scarcely yet assumed its place among the philosophic sciences--_Æsthetics_, the science of the beautiful. _Difficulty of defining._--What, then, is the beautiful?--A question that meets us at the threshold, and that has received, from different sources, answers almost as many and diverse as the writers that have undertaken its discussion. It is easy to specify instances of the beautiful without number, and of endless variety; but that is not defining it. On the contrary, it is only increasing the difficulty; for, where so many things are beautiful, and so diverse from each other, how are we to decide what is that one property which they all have in common, viz., beauty? The difficulty is to fix upon any one quality or attribute that shall pertain alike to all the objects that seem to us beautiful. A figure of speech, a statue, a star, an air from an opera, all strike us as beautiful, all awaken in us the emotion which beauty alone can excite. But what have they in common? It were easy to fix upon something in the case of the statue, or of the star, which should account, perhaps, for the pleasure those objects afford us; but the same thing might not apply to the figure of speech, or to the musical air. It would seem almost hopeless to attempt the solution of the problem in this method. And yet there _must be_, it would seem, some principle or attribute in which these various objects that we call beautiful agree, which is the secret and substance of their beauty, and the cause of that uniform effect which they all produce upon us. Philosophers have accordingly proposed various solutions of the