But the problem remains—Is there any such thing as the æsthetic state, or any æsthetic character of experiences which is _sui generis_? Not many explicit arguments have ever been given for one. Vernon Lee, it is true, in _Beauty and Ugliness_, p. 10, argues that “a relation entirely _sui generis_ between visible and audible forms and ourselves” can be deduced from the fact “that given proportions, shapes, patterns, compositions have a tendency to recur in art.” How this can be done it is hard to divine. Arsenic tends to recur in murder cases, and tennis in the summer, but no characters or relations _sui generis_ anywhere are thereby proved. Obviously you can only tell whether anything is like or unlike other things by examining it and them, and to notice that one case of it is like another case of it, is not helpful. It may be suspected that where the argument is so confused, the original question was not very clear. The question is whether a certain kind of experience is or is not _like_ other kinds of experience. Plainly it is a question as to degree of likeness. Be it granted at once, to clear the air, that there are all sorts of experiences involved in the values of the arts, and that attributions of Beauty spring from all sorts of causes. Is there among these one kind of experience as different from experiences which don’t so occur as, say envy is from remembering, or as mathematical calculation is from eating cherries? And what degree of difference would make it specific? Put this way it is plainly not an easy question to answer. These differences, none of them measurable, are of varying degree, and all are hard to estimate. Yet the vast majority of post-Kantian writers, and many before him, have unhesitatingly replied, “Yes! the æsthetic experience is peculiar and specific.” And their grounds, when not merely verbal, have usually been those of direct inspection. It requires some audacity to run counter to such a tradition, and I do not do so without reflection. Yet, after all, the matter is one of classification, and when so many other divisions in psychology are being questioned and re-organised, this also may be re-examined. The case for a distinct æsthetic species of experience can take two forms. It may be held that there is some unique kind of mental element which enters into æsthetic experiences and into no others. Thus Mr Clive Bell used to maintain the existence of an unique emotion ‘æsthetic emotion’ as the _differentia_. But psychology has no place for such an entity. What other will be suggested? Empathy, for example, as Vernon Lee herself insists, enters into innumerable other experiences as well as into æsthetic experiences. I do not think any will be proposed.