The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

The work develops a systematic theory that treats beauty as a distinctive kind of value grounded in perception and feeling, distinguishing aesthetic judgments from moral ones and locating preference partly in irrational response. It analyzes pleasure, the contrast of work and play, and how different human faculties and senses, including sound and colour, contribute to aesthetic experience. A major section examines form — unity, symmetry, multiplicity, indeterminacy — and the organizing role of utility in nature and the arts. The concluding treatment of expression describes associative processes and how secondary meanings, literary form, character, and religious imagination shape aesthetic value.