and subsidiary quality.
Cat clawing a Turkey-Cock, Ducks, Birds, and Seashells
c. 5 CE. Roman mosaic from Pompeii
Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples
In many things, their relations give limit and law to their beauty, and, as we here find the impression of beauty dependent on an obvious utility, coming and going therewith, it would seem an easy and correct explanation to refer this peculiar intuition and feeling to the perception and pleasure of an evident adaptation of means to an end in the object before us. The error of such a reference is clearly seen, however, in another class of cases, in which this quality is found to have no such connection with the useful and to exist in a high degree with no reference, or with a very obscure and remote reference, in the object to any use.
Ganesha
Hoysala Empire, 12th-13th century
Chloritic schist
Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
The Avery Brundage Collection
If we undertake to deduce beauty from any quality or relation of things, however successful we may think ourselves in a few chosen instances, we will find a large number of objects which our theory should explain beyond its power.
A more careful examination of the very cases on which we rely will show us, that, while beauty may exist with, it exists in addition to the quality from which we would derive it; that the utility with which it is associated is not a cause, but a temporary condition of its existence, or rather that the same relations of the object include and determine both its beauty and its utility.
A Bear Walking
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1490
Metalpoint, 10.3 × 13.3 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
As it follows, therefore, in regular sequence, there is no one quality or set of qualities. Instead, we say that it itself is a primary and simple quality. There is involved in this assertion an inability to give any explanation of the attribute, or any definition of the word by which it is expressed. It is compound and derived from things which can be explained. Simple things can only be directly known and felt. Any explanation involves a decomposition of the thing explained, a consideration of its parts, and thus an apprehension of it as a whole, or the reference of it to some source or cause whence it proceeded, and in connection with which it is understood.
Lion
Albrecht Dürer, c. 1494
Gouache and gold layer on parchment, 12.6 × 17.2 cm
Kunsthalle, Hamburg
But no simple thing can be decompounded and explained through its parts; or can a primary thing be referred as a derivative to something back of it, and thus be explained in its cause.
Nor is the word by which such simplicity is expressed, capable of any other definition than that of a synonym. A definition must include one or more characteristic and distinguishing qualities by which the thing in hand is separated from all others.
Sea Crab
Albrecht Dürer, 1495
Watercolour, gouache, 26.3 × 35.5 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
But in the case of a simple thing there is but one quality, and that alone can be mentioned, and this is to name a synonym.
All knowledge, therefore, of that which is simple and primary, whether in perception or intuition, must be direct. Mind must interpret mind, and only by the interpretation of similar faculties can this class of properties be apprehended. Certain original perceptions and intuitions must be granted us as the basis of every defining and explanatory process.
Detail of The Garden of Earthly Delights (left panel: Paradise)
Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1500-1505
Oil on panel
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Explanation cannot go back of its own postulates to throw light upon starting-points. Senses and faculties directly conversant with qualities the same for all, are these postulates. All simple and primary notions and attributes are directly known through these faculties, and the language which expresses them is only explicable to those who have the key, the chart, of kindred faculties. The term beauty is susceptible, then, of no definition, and the quality beauty of no further knowledge and explanation than that which the very power by which we perceive, feel, and know it is able to give.
A Young Hare
Albrecht Dürer, 1502
Watercolour and gouache on paper, 25 × 23cm
Grafische Sammlung, Albertina, Vienna
The conditions and relations of such an attribute may still invite our attention. The simple and primary character of beauty does not exclude our second assertion, which is, that this quality is reasonable, that is, a quality for whose existence a reason can be rendered. Certain other qualities occasion it to exist and these may be pointed out. Right is a primary quality, yet all our judgments of right proceed on certain premises which sustain them, and which can be rendered as a reason why we suppose this characteristic of action present.
Rearing Horse
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1505
Pen and ink, red chalk, 15.3 × 14.2 cm
Royal Library, Windsor Castle
Thus beauty, when present, is so through causes which can be more or less distinctly assigned, and is not, like the properties of matter, merely known to be, without any knowledge of that which occasions them to be. The proof of this is in the fact that there are questions of beauty, by the concession of all, admitting and calling forth discussion; that men not only discuss points of taste, but are persuaded by the reasoning employed. Indeed, if it were as true of intellectual as of physical tastes, that there is no dispute concerning them, our whole department would be at once annihilated and fall back among the things incapable of explanation and knowledge.
Barn Owl (Syrnium aluco)
Albrecht
