Abstract
thought is not contemplative but active. I do not ask, What is beauty? or even How do we judge what is beautiful? I ask as simply as I can, What prompts men to make something which seems beautiful, to them or to others? This is a rational question and it deserves a rational answer. We must not retreat from it into vague intuitions, or side-step it with hymns of praise to the mystical nature of beauty. I am not talking about mystics: I am talking about human beings who make things to use and to see. A rational aesthetic must start from the conviction that art (and science too) is a normal activity of human life. All the way back to the cave paintings and the invention of the first stone tools, what moved men either to paint or to invent was an everyday impulse. But it was an impulse in the everyday of men, not of animals. Whether we search for the
Published Version
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