Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good

by Victor Cousin

The philosophy of sensation, in faithfulness to itself, should have attempted to reduce the beautiful to the agreeable.

Without doubt, beauty is almost always agreeable to the senses, or at least it must not wound them. Most of our ideas of the beautiful come to us by sight and hearing, and all the arts, without exception, are addressed to the soul through the body. An object which makes us suffer, were it the most beautiful in the world, very rarely appears to us such. Beauty has little influence over a soul occupied with grief.

But if an agreeable sensation often accompanies the idea of the beautiful, we must not conclude that one is the other.

Experience testifies that all agreeable things do not appear beautiful, and that, among agreeable things, those which are most so are not the most beautiful,—a sure sign that the agreeable is not the beautiful; for if one is identical with the other, they should never be separated, but should always be commensurate with each other.

Far from this, whilst all our senses give us agreeable sensations, only two have the privilege of awakening in us the idea of beauty. Does one ever say: This is a beautiful taste, this is a beautiful smell? Nevertheless, one should say it, if the beautiful is the agreeable. On the other hand, there are certain pleasures of odor and taste that move sensibility more than the greatest beauties of nature and art; and even among the perceptions of hearing and sight, those are not always the most vivid that most excite in us the idea of beauty. Do not pictures, ordinary in coloring, often move us more deeply than many dazzling productions, more seductive to the eye, less touching to the soul? I say farther; sensation not only does not produce the idea of the beautiful, but sometimes stifles it. Let an artist occupy himself with the reproduction of voluptuous forms; while pleasing the senses, he disturbs, he repels in us the chaste and pure idea of beauty. The agreeable is not, then, the measure of the beautiful, since in certain cases it effaces it and makes us forget it; it is not, then, the beautiful, since it is found, and in the highest degree, where the beautiful is not.

This conducts us to the essential foundation of the distinction between the idea of the beautiful and the sensation of the agreeable, to wit, the difference already explained between sensibility and reason.

When an object makes you experience an agreeable sensation, if one asks you why this object is agreeable to you, you can answer nothing, except that such is your impression; and if one informs you that this same object produces upon others a different impression and displeases them, you are not much astonished, because you know that sensibility is diverse, and that sensations must not be disputed. Is it the same when an object is not only agreeable to you, but when you judge that it is beautiful? You pronounce, for example, that this figure is noble and beautiful, that this sunrise or sunset is beautiful, that disinterestedness and devotion are beautiful, that virtue is beautiful; if one contests with you the truth of these judgments, then you are not as accommodating as you were just now; you do not accept the dissent as an inevitable effect of different sensibilities, you no longer appeal to your sensibility which naturally terminates in you, you appeal to an authority which is made for others as well as you, that of reason; you believe that you have the right of accusing him with error who contradicts your judgment, for here your judgment rests no longer on something variable and individual, like an agreeable or painful sensation. The agreeable is confined for us within the inclosure of our own organization, where it changes every moment, according to the perpetual revolutions of this organization, according to health and sickness, the state of the atmosphere, that of our nerves, etc. But it is not so with beauty; beauty, like truth, belongs to none of us; no one has the right to dispose of it arbitrarily, and when we say: this is true, this is beautiful, it is no longer the particular and variable impression of our sensibility that we express, it is the absolute judgment that reason imposes on all men.

Confound reason and sensibility, reduce the idea of the beautiful to the sensation of the agreeable, and taste no longer has a law. If a person says to me, in the presence of the Apollo Belvidere, that he feels nothing more agreeable than in presence of any other statue, that it does not please him at all, that he does not feel its beauty, I cannot dispute his impression; but if this person thence concludes that the Apollo is not beautiful, I proudly contradict him, and declare that he is deceived. Good taste is distinguished from bad taste; but what does this distinction signify, if the judgment of the beautiful is resolved into a sensation? You say to me that I have no taste. What does that mean? Have I not senses like you? Does not the object which you admire act upon me as well as upon you? Is not the impression which I feel as real as that which you feel? Whence comes it, then, that you are right,—you who only give expression to the impression which you feel, and that I am wrong,—I who do precisely the same thing? Is it because those who feel like you are more numerous than those who feel like me? But here the number of voices means nothing? The beautiful being defined as that which produces on the senses an agreeable impression, a thing that pleases a single man, though it were frightfully ugly in the eyes of all the rest of the human race, must, nevertheless, and very legitimately, be called beautiful by him who receives from it an agreeable impression, for, so far as he is concerned, it satisfies the definition. There is, then, no true beauty; there are only relative and changing beauties, beauties of circumstance, custom, fashion, and all these beauties, however different, will have a right to the same respect, provided they meet sensibilities to which they are agreeable. And as there is nothing in this world, in the infinite diversity of our dispositions, which may not please some one, there will be nothing that is not beautiful; or, to speak more truly, there will be nothing either beautiful or ugly, and the Hottentot Venus will equal the Venus de Medici. The absurdity of the consequences demonstrates the absurdity of the principle. But there is only one means of escaping these consequences, which is to repudiate the principle, and recognize the judgment of the beautiful as an absolute judgment, and, as such, entirely different from sensation.

Finally, and this is the last rock of empiricism, is there in us only the idea of an imperfect and finite beauty, and while we are admiring the real beauties that nature furnishes, are we not elevating ourselves to the idea of a superior beauty, which Plato, with great excellence of expression, calls the Idea of the beautiful, which, after him, all men of delicate taste, all true artists call the Ideal? If we establish decrees in the beauty of things, is it not because we compare them, often without noticing it, with this ideal, which is to us the measure and rule of all our judgments in regard to particular beauties? How could this idea of absolute beauty enveloped in all our judgments on the beautiful,—how could this ideal beauty, which it is impossible for us not to conceive, be revealed to us by sensation, by a faculty variable and relative like the objects that it perceives?

The philosophy which deduces all our ideas from the senses falls to the ground, then, before the idea of the beautiful. It remains to see whether this idea can be better explained by means of sentiment, which is different from sensation, which so nearly resembles reason that good judges have often taken it for reason, and have made it the principle of the idea of the beautiful as well as that of the good. It is already a progress, without doubt, to go from sensation to sentiment, and Hutcheson and Smith[100] are in our eyes very different philosophers from Condillac and Helvetius;[101] but we believe that we have sufficiently established[102] that, in confounding sentiment with reason, we deprive it of its foundation and rule, that sentiment, particular and variable in its nature, different to different men, and in each man continually changing, cannot be sufficient for itself. Nevertheless, if sentiment is not a principle, it is a true and important fact, and, after having distinguished it well from reason, we ourselves proceed to elevate it far above sensation, and elucidate the important part it plays in the perception of beauty.