And secondly (2) it is to be observed that beautiful objects are
themselves, for the most part, organic unities, in this sense, that
they are wholes of great complexity, such that the contemplation of
any part, by itself, may have no value, and yet that, unless the
contemplation of the whole includes the contemplation of that part, it
will lose in value. From this it follows that there can be no single
criterion of beauty. It will never be true to say: This object owes its
beauty _solely_ to the presence of this characteristic; nor yet that:
Wherever this characteristic is present, the object must be beautiful.
All that can be true is that certain objects are beautiful, _because_
they have certain characteristics, in the sense that they would not
be beautiful _unless_ they had them. And it may be possible to find
that certain characteristics are more or less universally present in
all beautiful objects, and are, in this sense, more or less important
conditions of beauty. But it is important to observe that the very
qualities, which differentiate one beautiful object from all others,
are, if the object be truly beautiful, as _essential_ to its beauty,
as those which it has in common with ever so many others. The object
would no more have the beauty it has, without its specific qualities,
than without those that are generic; and the generic qualities, _by
themselves_, would fail, as completely, to give beauty, as those which
are specific.
=122.= II. It will be remembered that I began this survey of great
unmixed goods, by dividing all the greatest goods we know into the two
classes of aesthetic enjoyments, on the one hand, and the pleasures of
human intercourse or of personal affection, on the other. I postponed
the consideration of the latter on the ground that they presented
additional complications. In what this additional complication
consists, will now be evident; and I have already been obliged to
take account of it, in discussing the contribution to value made by
true belief. It consists in the fact that in the case of personal
affection, the object itself is not _merely_ beautiful, while possessed
of little or no intrinsic value, but is itself, in part at least,
of great intrinsic value. All the constituents which we have found
to be necessary to the most valuable aesthetic enjoyments, namely,
appropriate emotion, cognition of truly beautiful qualities, and true
belief, are equally necessary here; but here we have the additional
fact that the object must be not only truly beautiful, but also truly
good in a high degree.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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