The Breviary of Aesthetic 11
more than pleasurable or different from pleasurable. Never-
theless, the doctrine that defines art as the pleasurable has
a special denomination (hedonistic æsthetie), and a long
and complicated development in the history of aesthetic doc-
trines : it shewed itself in the Graeco-Roman world, prevailed
in the eighteenth century, reflowered in the second half of
the nineteenth, and still enjoys much favour, being especially
well received by beginners in aesthetic, who are above all
struck by the fact that art causes pleasure. The life of this
doctrine has consisted of proposing in turn one or another
class of pleasures, or several classes together (the pleasure
of the superior senses, the pleasure of play, of consciousness
of our own strength, of criticism, etc., etc.), or of adding to
it elements differing from the pleasurable, the useful for
example (when understood as distinct from the pleasura-
ble), the satisfaction of COgnoscitive and moral wants, and
the like. And its progress has been caused just by this rest-
lessness, and by its allowing foreign elements to ferment in
its bosom, which it introduces through the necessity of some-
how bringing itself into agreement with the reality of art,
thus attaining to its dissolution as hedonistic doctrine and to
the promotion of a new doctrine, or at least to drawing at-
tention to its necessity. And since every error has its ele-
ment of truth (and that of the physical doctrine has been
seen to be the possibility of the physical “construction” of
art as of any other fact), the hedonistic doctrine has its eter-
nal element of truth in the placing in relief the hedonistic
accompaniment, or pleasure, common to the aesthetic activ-
ity as to every form of spiritual activity, which it has not at
all been intended to deny in absolutely denying the identifi-
cation of art with the pleasurable, and in distinguishing it
from the pleasurable by defining it as intuition.