object which I passively receive; but, as a matter of fact, all that
is given are certain visual sensations; that these are my friend, is
pure interpretation--I construct the object in embodying this thought
in the color and shape I see. The elaboration of sensation in perception
is usually so rapid that, apart from reflection, I do not realize the
mental activity involved. But if it turns out that it was some other
man that I saw, then I realize at once that my perception was a work
of mind, an expression of my own thought. Of course, not all perceptions
are beautiful. Only as felt to be mysterious or tender or majestic is
a landscape beautiful; and women only as possessed of the charm we
feel in their presence. That is, perceptions are beautiful only when
they embody feelings. The sea, clouds and hills, men and women, as
perceived, awaken reactions which, instead of being attributed to the
mind from which they proceed, are experienced as belonging to the
things evoking them, which therefore come to embody them. And this
process of emotional and objectifying perception has clearly no other
end than just perception itself. We do not gaze upon a landscape or
a pretty child for any other purpose than to get the perceptual,
emotional values that result. The aesthetic perception of nature is,
as Kant called it, disinterested; that is, autonomous and free. The
beauty of nature, therefore, is an illustration of our definition.

On the same terms, life as remembered or observed or lived, may have
the quality of beauty. In reverie we turn our attention back over
events in our own lives that have had for us a rare emotional
significance; these events then come to embody the wonder, the interest,
the charm that excited us to recollect them. Here the activity of
remembering is not a mere habit set going by some train of accidental
association; or merely practical, arising for the sake of solving some
present problem by applying the lesson of the past to it; or finally,