The Sense of Beauty

Santayana's first philosophical book, subtitled Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory, written from his lectures on aesthetics at Harvard. It offers a naturalistic, psychological account of beauty. Santayana argues that aesthetic judgements are judgements of value, and that value comes from our feelings and preferences rather than from the objects themselves. Beauty, in his well-known formula, is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing: a positive, intrinsic value that we project onto what we perceive. The book is divided into four parts. "The Nature of Beauty" separates aesthetic pleasure from physical pleasure and from moral or practical interest. "The Materials of Beauty" covers the senses, colour, sound and the passions. "Form" deals with symmetry, unity in variety and the role of type. "Expression" explains how associations and meanings attached to an object enter into our sense of its beauty, including the appeal of the tragic and the comic.

It is a short, elegant attempt to explain beauty in terms of human nature, and a clear starting point for anyone asking whether beauty is in the object or in the eye of the beholder.