PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS. PART SECOND. ESSAY FIRST. ON THE BEAUTIFUL. INTRODUCTION. In the volume which I have already published on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, when I have had occasion to speak of the Pleasures of Imagination, I have employed that phrase to denote the pleasures which arise from ideal creations or combinations, in contradistinction. to those derived from the realities which human life presents to our senses. Mr Addison, in his well-known and justly admired papers on this subject, uses the same words in a more extensive acceptation; to express the pleasures which beauty, greatness, or novelty, excite in the mind, when presented to it, either by the powers of perception, or by the faculty of imagination; distinguish ing these two classes of agreeable effects, by calling the one primary, and the other secondary pleasures. As I propose to confine myself, in this Essay, to Beauty, the first of the three qualities mentioned by Addison, it is unnecessary for me to inquire, how far his enumeration is complete; or how far his classification is logical. But, as I shall have frequently occasion, in the sequel, to speak of the Pleasures of Imagination, I must take the liberty of remarking, in vindication of my own phraseology, that philosophical precision indispensably requires an exclusive limitation of that title to what Mr Addison calls secondary pleasures; because, although ultimately founded on pleasures derived from our perceptive powers, they are yet (as will afterwards appear) characterized by some very remarkable circumstances, peculiar to themselves. It is true, that when we enjoy the beauties of a certain class of external objects, (for example, those of a landscape,) imagination is often, perhaps always, more or less busy; but the case is the same with various other intellectual principles, which must operate, in a greater or less degree, wherever men are to be found; such principles, for instance, as the association of ideas ;-sympathy with the enjoyments of animated beings;-or a speculative curiosity concerning the uses and fitnesses, and systematical relations which are everywhere conspicuous in nature *; and, therefore, to refer *To these principles must be added, in such a state of society as ours, the number. less acquired habits of observation and of thought, which diversify the effects of the to imagination alone, our perception of these beauties, together with all the various enjoyments, both intellectual and moral, which accompany it, is to sanction, by our very definitions, a partial and erroneous theory. I shall, accordingly, in this, and in the following essays, continue to use the same language as formerly; separating, wherever the phenomena in question will admit of such a separation, the pleasures we receive immediately by our senses, from those which depend on ideal combinations formed by the intellect *. Agreeably to this distinction, I propose, in treating of Beauty, to begin with considering the more simple and general principles on which depend the pleasures that we experience in the case of actual perception; after which, I shall proceed to investigate the sources of those specific and characteristical charms which imagination lends to her own productions. very same perceptions in the minds of the painter; of the poet; of the landscapegardener; of the farmer; of the civil or the military engineer; of the geological theorist, &c. &c. &c. *What Mr Addison has called the Pleasures of Imagination, might be denominated, more correctly, the pleasures we receive from the objects of Taste; a power of the mind which is equally conversant with the pleasures arising from sensible things, and with such as result from the creations of human genius. D d |