Not only is the general fact of sexual attraction an essential element of æsthetic contemplation, as Santayana remarks, but we have to recognize also that specific sexual emotion properly comes within the æsthetic field. It is quite erroneous, as Groos well points out, to assert that sexual emotion has no æsthetic value. On the contrary, it has quite as much value as the emotion of terror or of pity. Such emotion, must, however, be duly subordinated to the total æsthetic effect. (K. Groos, _Der Æsthetische Genuss_, p. 151.) "The idea of beauty," Remy de Gourmont says, "is not an unmixed idea; it is intimately united with the idea of carnal pleasure. Stendhal obscurely perceived this when he defined beauty as 'a promise of happiness.' Beauty is a woman, and women themselves have carried docility to men so far as to accept this aphorism which they can only understand in extreme sexual perversion.... Beauty is so sexual that the only uncontested works of art are those that simply show the human body in its nudity. By its perseverance in remaining purely sexual Greek statuary has placed itself forever above all discussion. It is beautiful because it is a beautiful human body, such a one as every man or every woman would desire to unite with in the perpetuation of the race.... That which inclines to love seems beautiful; that which seems beautiful inclines to love. This intimate union of art and of love is, indeed, the only explanation of art. Without this genital echo art would never have been born and never have been perpetuated. There is nothing useless in these deep human depths; everything which has endured is necessary. Art is the accomplice of love. When love is taken away there is no art; when art is taken away love is nothing but a physiological need." (Remy de Gourmont, _Culture des Idées_, 1900, p. 103, and _Mercure de France_, August, 1901, pp. 298 et seq.)