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,
not unpleasantly insistent, like the images aroused by worry and sorrow,
but spontaneous and self-rewarding, hence beautiful.
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