A more serious defect in æsthetics is the avoidance of considerations as to value. It is true that an ill-judged introduction of value considerations usually leads to disaster, as in Tolstoy’s case. But the fact that some of the experiences to which the arts give rise are valuable and take the form they do because of their value is not irrelevant. Whether this fact is of service in analysis will naturally depend upon the theory of value adopted. But to leave it out of account altogether is to run the risk of missing the clue to the whole matter. And the clue has in fact been missed. All modern æsthetics rests upon an assumption which has been strangely little discussed, the assumption that there is a distinct _kind_ of mental activity present in what are called æsthetic experiences. Ever since “the first rational word concerning beauty”[1] was spoken by Kant, the attempt to define the ‘judgment of taste’ as concerning pleasure which is disinterested, universal, unintellectual, and not to be confused with the pleasures of sense or of ordinary emotions, in short to make it a thing _sui generis_, has continued. Thus arises the phantom problem of the æsthetic mode or æsthetic state, a legacy from the days of abstract investigation into the Good, the Beautiful and the True. The temptation to align this tripartite division with a similar division into Will, Feeling and Thought was irresistible. “All the faculties of the Soul, or capacities, are reducible to three, which do not admit of any further derivation from a common ground: the _faculty of knowledge_, the _feeling of pleasure or displeasure_, and the _faculty of desire_”[2] said Kant. Legislative for each of these faculties stood Understanding, Judgment and Reason respectively. “Between the faculties of knowledge and desire stands the feeling of pleasure, just as judgment is intermediate between understanding and reason.” And he went on to discuss æsthetics as appertaining to the province of judgment, the middle one of these three, the first and last having already occupied him in his two other Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason respectively. The effect was virtually to annex æsthetics to Idealism, in which fabric it has ever since continued to serve important purposes.