Some people may be surprised at my not having called this "beauty." Of
course, to those who define beauty as "combinations of lines and colours
that provoke aesthetic emotion," I willingly concede the right of
substituting their word for mine. But most of us, however strict we may
be, are apt to apply the epithet "beautiful" to objects that do not
provoke that peculiar emotion produced by works of art. Everyone, I
suspect, has called a butterfly or a flower beautiful. Does anyone feel
the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for
a cathedral or a picture? Surely, it is not what I call an aesthetic
emotion that most of us feel, generally, for natural beauty. I shall
suggest, later, that some people may, occasionally, see in nature what
we see in art, and feel for her an aesthetic emotion; but I am satisfied
that, as a rule, most people feel a very different kind of emotion for
birds and flowers and the wings of butterflies from that which they feel
for pictures, pots, temples and statues. Why these beautiful things do
not move us as works of art move is another, and not an aesthetic,
question. For our immediate purpose we have to discover only what
quality is common to objects that do move us as works of art. In the
last part of this chapter, when I try to answer the question--"Why are
we so profoundly moved by some combinations of lines and colours?" I
shall hope to offer an acceptable explanation of why we are less
profoundly moved by others.

Since we call a quality that does not raise the characteristic aesthetic
emotion "Beauty," it would be misleading to call by the same name the
quality that does. To make "beauty" the object of the aesthetic emotion,
we must give to the word an over-strict and unfamiliar definition.
Everyone sometimes uses "beauty" in an unaesthetic sense; most people
habitually do so. To everyone, except perhaps here and there an