But perhaps the literature of Criticism is the wrong place in which to expect such an inquiry. Philosophers, Moralists and Æstheticians are perhaps the competent authorities? There is certainly no lack of treatises upon the Good and the Beautiful, upon Value and upon the Æsthetic State, and the treasures of earnest endeavour lavished upon these topics have not been in vain. Those investigators who have relied upon Reason, upon the Select Intuition and the Ineluctable Argument, who have sat down without the necessary facts to think the matter out, have at least thoroughly discredited a method which apart from their labours would hardly have been suspected of the barrenness it has shown. And those who, following Fechner, have turned instead to the collection and analysis of concrete, particular facts and to empirical research into æsthetics have supplied a host of details to psychology. In recent years especially, much useful information upon the processes which make up the appreciation of works of art has been skilfully elicited. But it is showing no ingratitude to these investigators if we point out certain defects of almost all experimental work on æsthetics, which make their results at best of only indirect service to our wider problems. The most obvious of these concerns their inevitable choice of experiments. Only the simplest human activities are at present amenable to laboratory methods. Æstheticians have therefore been compelled to begin with as simple forms of ‘æsthetic choice’ as can be devised. In practice, line-lengths and elementary forms, single notes and phrases, single colours and simple collocations, nonsense syllables, metronomic beats, skeleton rhythms and metres and similar simplifications have alone been open to investigation. Such more complex objects as have been examined have yielded very uncertain results, for reasons which anyone who has ever _both_ looked at a picture or read a poem _and_ been inside a psychological laboratory or conversed with a representative psychologist will understand.