The Sense of Beauty

Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

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About this book

George Santayana (1863-1952) wrote this book from the lectures on the theory and history of aesthetics he gave at Harvard College between 1892 and 1895, and its preface is dated 1906. The subtitle calls it the outlines of aesthetic theory, and it argues that the sense of beauty has a far larger place in ordinary life than philosophy has usually allowed.

The argument runs in four parts: the nature of beauty, treated as a theory of values; the materials of beauty, such as sound, colour and the influence of love; form, including symmetry, types, landscape and the shape of a plot; and expression, which leads to the sublime, the comic, wit, humour and the grotesque.

Santayana says he aimed at sincerity rather than novelty, and he leaves out quarrels with other writers so that readers can test his claims against their own experience. It is a book for anyone curious about why some things please the eye and the mind.

About the author

George Santayana

George Santayana was a philosopher, poet, critic, and novelist whose work examined reason, imagination, culture, and the place of human life within nature. Sonnets and other verses, first published in 1894, belongs to his early poetic career and shows the formal discipline that remained important to his prose style.