_The common View correct._--I beg leave to take the common sense view of this question, which I cannot but think is, in the present instance, the most correct, and still to think and speak of the beauty of _objects_, and not of our own minds. Such is certainly the ordinary acceptation and use of the term, nor can any reason be shown why, in strictest philosophy, we should depart from it. There is no need of applying the term to denote the emotion awakened in the mind, for that emotion is not, in itself, either a new or a nameless one, but simply that mingled feeling of wonder and delight which we call admiration, and which passes, it may be, into love. To make beauty itself an emotion, is to be guilty of a double absurdity. It is to leave the quality of the object which gives rise to the emotion altogether without a name, and bestow that name where it is not needed, on that which has already a name of its own. _Beauty still objective, though reflected from the Mind._--If to this it be replied, that the beauty which we admire and which _seems_ to be a property of the external object, is, nevertheless, of internal origin, being merely a transfer to the object, and association with it, of certain thoughts and feelings of our own minds, a reflection of our own consciousness gilding and lighting up the objects around us, which objects are then viewed by us as having a light and beauty of their own, I answer, that even on this supposition, the external object, as thus illumined, has the power of awakening the pleasing emotion within us, and that power is its beauty, a property or quality of the object still, although borrowed originally from the mind; just as the moon, though it give but a reflected light, still shines, and with a beauty of its own. So long as those thoughts and feelings lay hidden in the mind, untransferred, unassociated with the external object, they were not _beauty_. Not until the object is invested with them, and they have become a property of that object, do they assume, to the mental eye, the quality of beauty. So, then, beauty is even still an objective reality, something that lies without us, and not within us. _The Power of expressing an objective Quality, likewise._--In like manner, if it be contended that beauty is only the sign and expression of mental qualities, I reply, that power of signifying or expressing is certainly a property of the object, and that property is its beauty, and is certainly a thing objective, and not a mere emotion.