The efforts of the associationists (the usurpers of to-day in the field of Æsthetic) to emerge from the difficulty, and to reaffirm in some way the unity which has been destroyed by their principle of association, are highly instructive. Some maintain that the image recalled is unconscious; others, leaving unconsciousness alone, hold that, on the contrary, it is vague, vaporous, confused, thus reducing the _force_ of the æsthetic fact to the _weakness_ of bad memory. But the dilemma is inexorable: either keep association and give up unity, or keep unity and give up association. No third way out of the difficulty exists. [Sidenote: _Criticism of æsthetic physics._] From the failure to analyse so-called natural beauty thoroughly and to recognize that it is simply an incident of æsthetic reproduction, and from having looked upon it, on the contrary, as given in nature, is derived all that portion of treatises upon Æsthetic entitled _Beauty of Nature_ or _Æsthetic Physics_; sometimes even subdivided, save the mark, into æsthetic Mineralogy, Botany and Zoology. We do not wish to deny that such treatises contain many just observations, and are sometimes themselves works of art, in so far as they represent beautifully the imaginings and fancies or impressions of their authors. But we must affirm it to be scientifically false to ask oneself if the dog be beautiful and the ornithorhynchus ugly, the lily beautiful and the artichoke ugly. Indeed, the error is here double. On the one hand, æsthetic Physics falls back into the equivocation of the theory of artistic and literary kinds, of attempting to attach æsthetic determinations to the abstractions of our intellect; on the other, it fails to recognize, as we said, the true formation of so-called natural beauty, a formation which excludes even the possibility of the question as to whether some given individual animal, flower or man be beautiful or ugly. What is not produced by the æsthetic spirit, or cannot be referred to it, is neither beautiful nor ugly. The æsthetic process arises from the ideal connexions in which natural objects are placed. [Sidenote: _Criticism of the theory of the beauty of the human body._]