Dear Sir,

The objections w^h. I ventured to make to your use of the word Beauty, as applied to the preferences of Birds and other non-human creatures, are not fundamentally more than differences of vocabulary. What they come to is perhaps this; The sense of Beauty in man is a synthesis of certain heterogeneous elements, including not merely peculiarities of visual sensation, w^h. he might share with an Argus pheasant, but also intellectual associations, w^h. the pheasant cannot have. Beauty for us men contains a notional or rational element—while in lower creatures it must be a simple sensation. Hence it seemed to me that you were taking a word with a rational feature in its connotation, and employing it of creatures in whom there is no scientific warrant for assuming that kind of rationality to lie at the bottom of their preferences.¹

Again, this attribution of æsthetic sentiment, identical with ours, to birds &c. appears misleading from my point of view, because it tends to discourage the Association method of analysis and explanation with respect to our sense of the beautiful. For instance, the writer in the ‘Spectator’ found in your account of the preferences of the female pheasant an instant argument for a divinely implanted sense of beauty in birds and men;² only this divine gift becomes weakened and blurred in men, until they acquire conscious knowledge of the laws of harmony in colour and so forth. It w^d. be very hard to hold you responsible for the inferences w^h. others may choose to draw from what you write. Still I was not surprised at this line of argumentation, because I felt that your attribution of aesthetic faculty proper, to birds and the rest, implies a certain absoluteness in the beautiful, an objective absoluteness, w^h. is not compatible with the Associational analysis. The fact that the female Argus pheasant admires ball and socket plumage, and that cultivated men admire it too, is in my eyes an accidental coincidence; the taste of men being resolvable into various elements, and that of the pheasant being no more, so far as our knowledge goes, than an inexplicable caprice, or not a taste at all in the strictest sense. Association may explain our finding beauty in the song of the nightingale, but I w^d. submit that we have no evidence that gratified sense of beauty is the source of pleasure in the female nightingale. We need a neutral word w^h. shall at once cover the preference of the Argus pheasant and of the terrible Condor; and w^h. shall not prejudge the philosophical question of the origin and composition of human preferences in colour, sound, form &c.

The omission of the word ‘great’ is a serious fault, and I much regret that such an error sh^d. have accidentally found its way into my paper.³ Should you not, however, be disposed to admit that even small changes seem very repugnant to savages? I do not quite realise to myself how, exactly, it was that this proved tenacity to use and wont in matters of physical preference, has come upon what must, at all events, have been a far wider tolerance of novelty & variation.

With reference to the third point to w^h. you allude, I had already read more than twice or thrice your 5th. chapter, and I ought, no doubt, I now think, to have expounded what you say there—as a commentary explaining what you say at the end of the book   I cannot help thinking, however,—and I hope you will not Deem me too presumptuous for saying so—that you are inclined to prolong the operation of Natural Selection into times and conditions w^h. belong of right to what I should call Social Selection—i.e. the selection by a community, through its current opinion, laws, institution, traditional usages, and so forth, of certain qualities and ideals of character, for admiration. The physical quality of the individual atom will be unimportant. The community is the organism, the unit. And the transmission is not physical, from father to son, but ‘in the air’ from generation to generation. That there are physical conditions cannot be doubted. But within the society itself, the characteristic habits of thought, rules of conduct, &c. are acquired through the non-physical medium of opinion, positive law &c. In the competition between integral and independent societies, w^h. are even in Europe more or less in a state of nature, the principle of Natural Selection w^d. of course resume.

I have put this in a very crude and slovenly manner—partly because I am ashamed to be writing to a person whose time is so valuable, at this inordinate length. Perhaps I may find occasion by and by to set out my notions more clearly in print, when I will venture to forward the result to you.

With many apologies for the length of my letter, and with profound respect, | I beg to remain, | Your’s very faithfully, | John Morley.