It is remarkably appropriate that this work on aesthetics should have been written by George Santayana, who is probably the most brilliant philosophic writer and the philosopher with the strongest sense of beauty since Plato. It is not a dry metaphysical treatise, as works on aesthetics so often are, but is itself a fascinating document: as much a revelation of the beauty of language as of the concept of beauty. This unabridged reproduction of the 1896 edition of lectures delivered at Harvard College is a study of why, when, and how beauty appears, what conditions an object must have to be beautiful, what makes us sensible of beauty, and the relationship between the object of beauty and the excitement of our sensibilities over it. The presentation throughout this work is concrete and easy to follow, with examples drawn from art, history, anthropology, psychology, and other areas.
