In the first place, then, it seems evident, that Agreeableness, in general, cannot be the same with Beauty, because there are very many things in the highest degree Agreeable, that can in no sense be called Beautiful. Moderate heat, and savoury food, and rest, and exercise, are Agreeable to the body ; but none of these can be called Beautiful ; and among objects of a higher class, the love and esteem of others, and fame, and a good conscience, and health, and riches, and wisdom, use all. eminently Agreeable ; but not at all. Beautiful, according to any intelligible use of the word. It is plainly quite absurd, there-. fore, to say that Beauty consists in Agreeableness, without specifying in consequence of what it is agree able,—or to hold that anything whatever is taught as to its nature, by mutely classing it among our plea surable emotions..
In the second. place, however, we may remark, that among all the objects that are Agreeable, whe ther they are also Beautiful or not, any tem are Agreeable on account of the same qualities, .nr even suggest their agreeableness to the same fa culty or organ. Most certainly there is no resem blance or affinity whatever between the qualities which make a peach. agreeable to the palate, and a beautiful statue to the eye ; which soothe us in an easy chair by the fire, or delight us in a philosophi cal discovery. The truth is, that Agreeableness is not properly a quality of any object whatsoever, but the effect or result of certain qualities, the nature of which we can generally define pretty exactly, or of which we know at least with certainty that they ma nifest themselves respectively to some one particular sense or faculty, and to no other ; and consequently, it would be just as obviously ridiculous to suppose a &malty or organ, whose office it was to perceive Agreeableness, as to suppose that Agreeableness was a distinct quality that could thus be perceived The class of agreeable objects, thanks to the bounty of Providence, is exceedingly large. Certain things are agreeable to the palate, and others to the smell and to the touch. Some again are agreeable to our faculty of imagination, or to our understand ing, or to our moral feelings; and noire of all these we call Besuatiful.. But there are others which we do call Beautiful ; and those we say are agreeable to our faculty of Taste abut when we come to ask what it the faculty of Taste, and what are the qualities which recommend them to that faculty?.—we find our
selves just where we were at the beginning of the sliscsaamon, and embarrassed with. all the difficulties arising from the prodigious diversity of objects which seem to possess these qualities.
We know pretty well what is the faculty of seeing or hearing ; or, at least, we know that what is agree able to one of those faculties, has no effect what. ever on the other. We know that bright odours afford no delight to the ear, nor sweet tones to the eye ; and are therefore perfectly assured that the qualities which make the visible objects agreeable, cannot be the same with those which give pleasure to the ear. But it is by the eye and by the ear that all material Beauty is perivived ; end yet the Beauty which dischnes itself to these two separate senses, and plainly depends masa qualities which have no sort of affinity, is supposed to be one distinct quali ty, and to be perceived by a peculiar sense or facul ty ! The perplexity becomes still greater when we think of the Beauty of poems or theorems, and endea vour to imagine what qualities they can possess in common with the agreeable modifications of light or of sound.
It is in these considerations undoubtedly that the difficulty of the subject consists. The faculty of Taste, plainly, is net a faculty like any of the external senses—the range of whose objects is limited and pre cise, as welles the qualities by which they are gratified or offended,--and Beauty, accordingly, is discovered in an infinite variety of objects, among which it seems, at first sight, impossible to discover any other bond of connexion. Yet boundless as their diversity may appear, it is plain that they must resemble each other in something, and in something more definite and de finable than merely in being agreeable ;—since they are all classed together, in every tongue and nation, under, the common appellation of Beautiful, and are felt indeed to produce emotions in the mind that have some sort of kindred or affinity. The words Beauty and Beautiful, in short, must mean something; and are universally felt to mean something much more de finite than agreeableness oe. gratification in and while it is confessedly by no means,easy to de scribe or define what that something is, the force and clearness of our perception of it is demonstrated by the readiness with which we determine, in any particular instance, whether the object of a given pleasurable emotion is or is not properly described as Beauty.