They do not realize
that they are dealing with a most subtle psychological question. The
chief source of confusion lies in their failure to distinguish between
what is admired as a thing of beauty as such and what pleases them for
other reasons. As Professor Sully has pointed out in his _Handbook of
Psychology_ (337):
"At the beginning of life there is no clear separation of
what is beautiful from what is simply pleasing to the
individual. As in the history of the race, so in that of the
individual, the sense of beauty slowly extricates itself
from pleasurable consciousness in general, and
differentiates itself from the sense of what _is personally
useful and agreeable_."
Bearing in mind this very important distinction between what is
beautiful and what is merely pleasing because of its being useful and
agreeable, we see at once that the words "decorative," "ornamental,"
"attractive," "handsome," etc., are constantly used by writers on this
subject in a misleading and question-begging way. We can hardly blame
a man like Barrington for writing (11) that among the natives of
Botany Bay "scars are, by both sexes, deemed highly ornamental"; but a
scientific author who quotes such a sentence ought to be aware that
the evidence did not justify Barrington in using any word but
_pleasing_ in place of "ornamental," because the latter implies and
takes for granted the esthetic sense, the existence of which is the
very thing to be proved.
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