You have read this with pleasure, and is not the source of this pleasure the ease and celerity with which the mind reaches the “desired conception”? Vividly and forcibly the mind is led by cunning use of phrase and rhythm and figure to realize the picture, and there is a glow of pleasure in the reaction from the facility. Language is a medium for the transfer of ideas, and when it accomplishes this office most effectively, as in the present case, and acts upon the mind so clearly and forcibly that _nolens volens_ the reader at once apprehends and comprehends, he feels a thrill of pleasure therewith, just as there is pleasure connected with the rapid and easy assimilation of well cooked food. Before developing and criticising this theory I may remark in passing that Blair, the rhetorician, in treating of the structure of sentences foreshadows in a way the economic theory when he writes that “to have the relation of every word and member of a sentence marked in the most proper and distinct manner, gives, not clearness only, but grace and beauty to a sentence, making the mind pass smoothly and agreeably along the parts of it.” This surely implies that æsthetical pleasure of style may be based in a psychological economy and facility. It is indeed a commonplace remark, “The book is so well written that you cannot mistake or miss its meaning”; wherein the identification of style with intelligibility becomes a truism. Certainly Mr. Spencer has not in the economic theory propounded anything radically new. We note at the outset that while this pleasure of style may result from economy it is not the pleasure of the conscious economizer. The reader who is enjoying a very readable book has a distinct pleasure from him who views with satisfaction his finishing a book at a great and unexpected saving of mental energy. We have here the direct pleasure from economical exercise of the faculties contrasted with the indirect introspective-retrospective pleasure at economy effected. Many persons take as much pleasure in making mental energy go as far as possible, but this pleasure in economy is obviously not the pleasure of style, which is not reflective, but naïve and direct impression.