Produced by Scott Pfenninger, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
This book has grown out of lectures to students at the University ofMichigan and embodies my effort to express to them the nature andmeaning of art. In writing it, I have sought to maintain scientificaccuracy, yet at the same time to preserve freedom of style andsomething of the inspiration of the subject. While intended primarilyfor students, the book will appeal generally, I hope, to people whoare interested in the intelligent appreciation of art.
My obligations are extensive,—most directly to those whom I have citedin foot-notes to the text, but also to others whose influence is tooindirect or pervasive to make citation profitable, or too obvious tomake it necessary. For the broader philosophy of art, my debt isheaviest, I believe, to the artists and philosophers during the periodfrom Herder to Hegel, who gave to the study its greatest development,and, among contemporaries, to Croce and Lipps. In addition, I havedrawn freely upon the more special investigations of recent times, butwith the caution desirable in view of the very tentative character ofsome of the results. To Mrs. Robert M. Wenley I wish to express mythanks for her very careful and helpful reading of the page proof.
The appended bibliography is, of course, not intended to be in anysense adequate, but is offered merely as a guide to further reading;a complete bibliography would itself demand almost a volume.
Although some feeling for beauty is perhaps universal among men, thesame cannot be said of the understanding of beauty. The average man,who may exercise considerable taste in personal adornment, in thedecoration of the home, or in the choice of poetry and painting, isat a loss when called upon to tell what art is or to explain why hecalls one thing "beautiful" and another "ugly." Even the artist andthe connoisseur, skilled to produce or accurate in judgment, are oftenwanting in clea