54. THE ESTHETIC SENTIMENT. APPREHENSION OF THE BEAUTIFUL.—We have seen that both the appetitive and the cognitive faculties are involved in the experience of the beautiful. Contemplation implies cognition; while the feeling of pleasure, complacency, satisfaction, delight, indicates the operation of appetite or will. Now the notion of the beautiful, like all our notions, has its origin in sense experience; but it is itself suprasensible for it is reached by abstraction, and this is above the power of sense faculties. While the senses and imagination apprehend beautiful objects the intellect attains to that which makes these objects beautiful, to the _ratio pulchri_ that is in them. No doubt, the perception or imagination of beautiful things, in nature or in art, produces as its natural concomitant, a feeling of sensible pleasure. To hear sweet music, to gaze on the brilliant variety of colours in a gorgeous pageant, to inhale delicious perfumes, to taste savoury dishes—all such experiences gratify the senses. But the feeling of such sensible pleasure is quite distinct from the esthetic enjoyment which accompanies the apprehension of the beautiful; though it is very often confounded with the latter. Such _sentient_ states of agreeable feeling are mainly _passive_, organic, physiological; while esthetic enjoyment, the appreciation of the beautiful, is eminently _active_. It implies the operation of a suprasensible faculty, the _intelligence_; it accompanies the reaction of the latter faculty to some appropriate objective stimulus of the suprasensible, intelligible order, to some “idea” embodied in the object of sense.(198)