judgment and feeling, that people disagree and dispute interminably about questions of beauty in art and nature. Herein beauty differs from truth. No doubt people dispute about the latter also; but at all events they recognize its objective character and the propriety of an appeal to the independent, impersonal standard of evidence. Not so, however, in regard to beauty: _De gustibus non est disputandum_: there is no disputing about tastes. The perception of beauty, the judgment that something is or is not beautiful, is the product of an act of _taste_, _i.e._ of the individual’s intelligence affected by numerous concrete personal dispositions both of the sentient and of the spiritual order, not only cognitive and appetitive but temperamental and emotional. Moreover, besides this variety in subjective dispositions, we have to bear in mind the effects of artistic culture, of educating the taste. The eye and the ear, which are the two main channels of data for the intellect, can be made by training more delicate and exacting, so that the same level of esthetic appreciation can be maintained only by a constantly increasing measure of artistic stimulation. Finally, apart from all that a beautiful object _directly conveys_ to us for contemplation, there is something more which it may _indirectly suggest_: it arouses a distinct activity of the imagination whereby we fill up, in our own individual degree and according to our own interpretation, what has not been actually supplied in it by nature or art. All those influences account sufficiently for the subjectivity and variability of the esthetic sentiment, for diversity of artistic tastes among individuals, for the transitions of fashion in art from epoch to epoch and from race to race. But it must not be concluded that the subjective factors in the constitution of the beautiful are wholly changeable. Since human nature is fundamentally the same in all men there ought to be a fund of esthetic judgments and pleasures common to all; there ought to be in nature and in art some things which are recognized and enjoyed as beautiful by all. And there are such. In matters _of detail_ the maxim holds: _De gustibus non disputandum_. But there are fundamental esthetic judgments for which it does not hold. Since men have a common nature, and since, as we shall see presently, there are recognizable and stable objective factors to determine esthetic judgments, there is a legitimate foundation on which to discuss and establish some esthetic canons of universal validity.