Note * — Chapter II · The Phantom Æsthetic State

Alternatively, the æsthetic experience may contain no unique constituent, and be of the usual stuff but with a special form. This is what it is commonly supposed to be. Now the special form as it is usually described—in terms of disinterestedness, detachment, distance, impersonality, subjective universality, and so forth—this form, I shall try to show later, is sometimes no more than a consequence of the incidence of the experience, a condition or an effect of communication. But sometimes a structure which can be described in the same terms is an essential feature of the experience, the feature in fact upon which its value depends. In other words, at least two different sets of characters, due to different causes, are, in current usage, ambiguously covered by the term ‘æsthetic.’ It is very necessary to distinguish the sense in which merely putting something in a frame or writing it in verse gives it an ‘æsthetic character,’ from a sense in which value is implied. This confusion, together with other confusions,* has made the term nearly useless.