Abstract
Beauty is diverse in character: Beautiful objects include works of art as well as views of nature, beautiful bodies as well as beautiful voices and beautiful thoughts. And it may be supposed that there not only are various beautiful objects in the world, but that their beauty itself is of diverse kinds. Scholars distinguish the beauty of nature from the different beauty of art, musical beauty from beauty in the visual arts, the beauty of actual shapes from the beauty of abstract forms, the beauty proper to objects from the different beauty that they draw from associations. Nevertheless, the history of aesthetics knows in sum few divisions of beauty. When Charles Perrault in the 17th century drew a distinction between necessary and contingent beauty, when Henry Home (Lord Kames) in the 18th separated relative from absolute beauty, and when Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 19th divided beauty into proper and associated, it was the same division all the time but under different names. In fine, the history of aesthetics has bequeathed considerably fewer attempts at classifying beauty than classifications of the arts.
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