ABSTRACT
Those who believe that it is only through experience that we come to realize that people have different likes and dislikes might dispute this last point. But unless philistinism is presupposed these grounds for disputing it do not support a secondary quality account of beauty. If we did commit the confusion spoken of, the qualities that correspond to secondary ones would not include beauty, but rather qualities like the pleasantness of a smell which depend, we learn, on the state of the perceiver. For if there is a genuine quality of beauty, it is something the apprehension of which is necessarily pleasant. In other words, a secondary quality account entails the Philistine position that there is no such thing as beauty in the sense just understood. If, on the contrary, there is a quality of beauty in a non-philistine sense, then its existence vindicates in this case our alleged tendency to objectify enjoyment. Thus beauty turns out to have the status of a primary quality rather than a secondary one. Such indeed is the account proposed by Santayana.
