The thesis that art consists of _pure beauty_ has often been brought forward against hedonistic and pedagogic Æsthetic, and eagerly taken up by artists: "Heaven places all our joy in _pure beauty,_ and the Verse is everything." If by this be understood that art is not to be confounded with sensual pleasure (utilitarian practicism), nor with the exercise of morality, then our Æsthetic also must be permitted to adorn itself with the title of _Æsthetic of pure beauty._ But if (as is often the case) something mystical and transcendent be meant by this, something unknown to our poor human world, or something spiritual and beatific, but not expressive, we must reply that while applauding the conception of a beauty _free from all that is not the spiritual form of expression,_ we are unable to conceive a beauty superior to this and still less that it should be _purified of expression,_ or severed from itself. XII THE ÆSTHETIC OF THE SYMPATHETIC AND PSEUDO-ÆSTHETIC CONCEPTS [Sidenote: _Pseudo-æsthetic concepts, and the æsthetic of the sympathetic._] The doctrine of the sympathetic (very often animated and seconded in this by the capricious metaphysical and mystical Æsthetic, and by that blind traditionalism which assumes an intimate connection between things fortuitously treated together by the same authors in the same books), has introduced and rendered familiar in systems of Æsthetic a series of concepts a rapid mention of which suffices to justify our resolute expulsion of them from our own treatise. Their catalogue is long, not to say interminable: _tragic, comic, sublime, pathetic, moving, sad, ridiculous, melancholy, tragi-comic, humorous, majestic, dignified, serious, grave, imposing, noble, decorous, graceful, attractive, piquant, coquettish, idyllic, elegiac, cheerful, violent, ingenuous, cruel, base, horrible, disgusting, dreadful, nauseating;_ the fist can be increased at will. Since that doctrine took the sympathetic as its special object, it was naturally unable to neglect any of the varieties of the sympathetic, any of the mixtures or gradations by means of which, starting from the sympathetic in its loftiest and most intense manifestation, its contrary, the antipathetic and repugnant, is finally reached. And since the sympathetic content was held to be the _beautiful_ and the antipathetic the _ugly,_ the varieties (tragic, comic, sublime, pathetic, etc.) constituted for that conception of Æsthetic the shades and gradations intervening between the beautiful and the ugly. [Sidenote: _Criticism of the theory of the ugly in art and of the overcoming of it._]