to other people in justification of what one is doing and in defense
of the value which one attaches to it. Thoughtful people cannot long
avoid trying to formulate the relation of their interest in beauty,
which absorbs so much energy and devotion, to other human interests,
to fix its place in the scheme of life. It would be surprising,
therefore, if there had been no Shelleys or Sidneys to define the
relation between poetry and science, or Tolstoys to speculate on the
nature of all art; and we should wonder if we did not everywhere hear
intelligent people discussing the relation of utility and goodness to
beauty, or asking what makes a poem or a picture great.

Now the science of aesthetics is an attempt to do in a systematic way
what thoughtful art lovers have thus always been doing haphazardly.
It is an effort to obtain a clear general idea of beautiful objects,
our judgments upon them, and the motives underlying the acts which
create them,--to raise the aesthetic life, otherwise a matter of
instinct and feeling, to the level of intelligence, of understanding.
To understand art means to find an idea or definition which applies
to it and to no other activity, and at the same time to determine its
relation to other elements of human nature; and our understanding will
be complete if our idea includes all the distinguishing characteristics
of art, not simply enumerated, but exhibited in their achieved
relations.

How shall we proceed in seeking such an idea of art? We must follow
a twofold method: first, the ordinary scientific method of observation,
analysis, and experiment; and second, another and very different method,
which people of the present day often profess to avoid, but which is
equally necessary, as I shall try to show, and actually employed by
those who reject it. In following the first method we treat beautiful