The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics

What is the nature of attraction; what is it that makes us regard one person, object or artwork as visually or aesthetically pleasing, while considering another to be unattractive? In a series of engaging and well-argued essays, author Vernon Lee, who is credited for introducing the concept of empathy into the English language, tackles this issue from a number of different perspectives. This book takes beauty as already existing and enjoyed, and seeks to analyze and account for Beauty's existence and enjoyment. More strictly speaking, it analyzes and accounts for Beauty not inasmuch as existing in certain objects and processes, but rather as calling forth (and being called forth by) a particular group of mental activities and habits. It does not ask: What are the peculiarities of the things (and the proceedings) which we call Beautiful? but: What are the peculiarities of our thinking and feeling when in the presence of a thing to which we apply this adjective? The study of single beautiful things, and even more, the comparison of various categories thereof, is indeed one-half of all scientific aesthetics, but only inasmuch as it adds to our knowledge of the particular mental activities which such "Beautiful" (and vice versa "Ugly") things elicit in us. For it is on the nature of this active response on our own part that depends the application of those terms Beautiful and Ugly in every single instance; and indeed their application in any instances whatsoever, their very existence in the human vocabulary.