Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, page 119 by Benedetto Croce
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ied to objects and scenes existing in nature, has a completely aesthetic signification.
It has been observed, that in order to enjoy natural objects aesthetically, we should withdraw them from their external and historical reality, and separate their simple appearance or origin from existence; that if we contemplate a landscape with our head between our legs, in such a way as to remove ourselves from our wonted relations with it, the landscape appears as an ideal spectacle; that nature is beautiful only for him who contemplates her with the eye of the artist; that zoologists and botanists do not recognize beautiful animals and flowers; that natural beauty is discovered (and examples of discovery are the points of view, pointed out by men of taste and imagination, and to which more or less aesthetic travellers and excursionists afterwards have recourse in pilgrimage, whence a more or less collective suggestion); that, without the aid of the imagination, no part of nature is beautiful, and that with such aid the same natural object or fact is now expressive, according to the disposition of the soul, now insignificant, now expressive of one definite thing, now of another, sad or glad, sublime or ridiculous, sweet or laughable; finally, that natural beauty, which an artist would not to some extent correct, does not exist.
All these observations are most just, and confirm the fact that natural beauty is simply a stimulus to aesthetic reproduction, which presupposes previous production. Without preceding aesthetic intuitions of the imagination, nature cannot arouse any at all. As regards natural beauty, man is like the mythical Narcissus at the fountain. They show further that since this stimulus is accidental, it is, for the most part, imperfect or equivocal. Leopardi said that natural beauty is "rare, scattered, and fugitive." Every one refers the natural fact to the expression which is in his mind. One artist is, as it were, carried away by