Note † — Chapter II · The Phantom Æsthetic State

All modern æsthetics rests upon an assumption which has been strangely little discussed, the assumption that there is a distinct kind of mental activity present in what are called æsthetic experiences. Ever since “the first rational word concerning beauty”† was spoken by Kant, the attempt to define the ‘judgment of taste’ as concerning pleasure which is disinterested, universal, unintellectual, and not to be confused with the pleasures of sense or of ordinary emotions, in short to make it a thing sui generis, has continued. Thus arises the phantom problem of the æsthetic mode or æsthetic state, a legacy from the days of abstract investigation into the Good, the Beautiful and the True.