. . . on what grounds can one form or specify a plan for “creating on Esthetics”— A science of the Beautiful? But do the moderns still use this word? It seems to me that they only still use it lightly. Or perhaps . . . in thinking of the past. Beauty is a kind of corpse. Novelty, intensity, strangeness,—in a word all the values of surprise have supplanted it. Crude excitement is the ruling mistress of contemporary minds; and the actual purpose of any work is to tear us from the contemplative state, from the static happiness whose image was formerly part of the general conception of Beauty. People are more and more occupied with the most unstable and immediate characteristics of the psychic and sensitive life. The unconscious, the irrational, the temporary which are, and their names proclaim the fact, denials or negations of the intentional and sustained forms of mental activity, have been substituted for the patterns natural to the mind. One hardly ever sees any more a product of the desire for perfection.