ABSTRACT
The former, in his principal work, gives us a brief historical account of certain types of aesthetic theory, and a yet briefer sketch of his own views on the subject. Beauty, for him, is the expression of emotion, and all such expression, without any exception, is beautiful. 1 But here we must be careful to draw a distinction ignored by Croce himself; for if expression and intuition were really equivalent, any perceptual awareness of real or imaginary objects would be an awareness of beauty, which would appear even in the dreams of sleep and in the listless and incoherent moments-of ordinary life. 2
It follows from this that the beautiful is neither the useful, nor the agreeable, nor the good. Besides, we value beauty for its own sake, whereas the useful is valued for its results; lovely objects please in the mere contemplation and the judgment of taste claims universal validity, whereas judgments on what is agreeable are purely personal and subjective; and, lastly, natural beauty is morally indifferent while ethical standards are irrelevant to art.
