M. GTJYAU, DE L'ESTHETIQUE CONTEMPOEAINE. 121

to a single short, though highly suggestive, chapter, and that the incidental hints in the Essays, though more fully elaborated, belong to an early stage of Mr. Spencer's thinking, and deal with a few special points alone. Mr. Sully, too, I shall leave to defend or modify his aesthetic theories, as he likes, in person. But for my own early work Physiological ^Esthetics which M. Guyau honours too greatly with much serious and generous criticism, I can frankly admit that it looks far too exclusively at the simpler sensuous elements of beauty only, lays too much stress on sight and hearing alone, and jumps too rapidly from these prime factors to the higher developments, without allowing nearly enough for the intermediate stages and the infinite interosculation of emo- tional, intellectual and associational disturbances. It is too rigid,, too schematic and too youthful. Nobody can feel more intensely than I now do the immense complexity of the sense of beauty, and its profound dependence upon innumerable chords in all parts of our nutritive and sensitive nature. " Selon M. Spen- cer et son ecole," says M. Guyau, " 1'idee du beau exclut : (1) ce qui est necessaire a la vie ; (2) ce qui est utile a la vie ; (3) elle exclut meme en general tout objet reel de desir et de possession pour se reduire au simple exercice, au simple jeu de notre activite." This, I think, hardly summarises aright the view in question. The necessary and the useful, we evolutionists believe, may all have their aesthetic side do all possess an aesthetic side, in fact ; but only in immediate contemplation of certain of their attributes other than their mere bare utility. When cognised as beautiful, they are not cognised as useful in the naked sense. M. Guyau himself admits that the poetry of a railway lies not so much in the permanent way, the rails and the sleepers, as in "the palpi- tating engines, snorting steam athwart the acres " ; and I fancy at bottom the differences between himself and his English con- temporaries are not quite as irreconcilable as he now imagines. Certainly w T hen he says, " Considerer le sentiment esthetique in- dependamment de 1'instinct sexuel et de son evolution nous semble aussi superficiel que de considerer le sentiment moral a part des instincts sympathiques," he is uttering a truth with which, I believe, the English psychologists themselves are deeply penetrated. English aestheticians cannot be accused of neglecting the importance of sexual selection, nor of overlooking the role played by love in all poetry, and by ideal female beauty in all plastic and pictorial art. Only, the untrammelled treatment of that side of the subject is rendered far more difficult by circum- stances in England than it is in France. In short, the recognition of an intimate fundamental connexion between functional life at large and the idea of the beautiful, which M. Guyau believes to be his own special discovery, seems to me, on the contrary, an essential principle of the entire Eng- lish evolutionary school. The latter portion of M. Guyau's volume deals rather, in his