CHAPTER III - OF ACCURACY AND INACCURACY IN IMPRESSIONS OF SENSE

Summary

By what test is the health of the perceptive faculty to be determined?

Hitherto we have observed only the distinctions of dignity among pleasures of sense, considered merely as such, and the way in which any of them may become theoretic in being received with right feeling.

But as we go farther, and examine the distinctive nature of ideas of beauty, we shall, I believe, perceive something in them besides æsthetic pleasure, something which attests a more important function belonging to them than attaches to other sensual ideas, and exhibits a more exalted character in the faculty by which they are received. And this was what I alluded to when I said in the chapter already referred to (§ 1) that “we may indeed perceive, as far as we are acquainted with the nature of God, that we have been so constructed as in a healthy state of mind to derive pleasure from whatever things are illustrative of that nature.”

This point it is necessary now farther to develope.

Our first inquiry must evidently be, how we are authorized to affirm of any man's mind, that it is in a healthy state or otherwise, respecting impressions of sight; and what canon or test there is by which we may determine of these impressions that they are or are not rightly esteemed beautiful.