Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, page 99 by Benedetto Croce
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embarrassed activity, the product of which is a failure. In linguistic usage, these denominations are being continually shifted from one order of facts to another, and from this to that. Beautiful, for instance, is said not only of a successful expression, but also of a scientific truth, of an action successfully achieved, and of a moral action: thus we talk of an intellectual beauty, of a beautiful action, of a moral beauty. Many philosophers, especially aestheticians, have lost their heads in their pursuit of these most varied uses: they have entered an inextricable and impervious verbal labyrinth. For this reason it has hitherto seemed convenient studiously to avoid the use of the word beautiful to indicate successful expression. But after all the explanations that have been given, and all danger of misunderstanding being now dissipated, and since, on the other hand, we cannot fail to recognize that the prevailing tendency, alike in current speech and in philosophy, is to limit the meaning of the vocable beautiful altogether to the aesthetic value, we may define beauty as successful expression, or better, as expression and nothing more, because expression, when it is not successful, is not expression.
[Sidenote] The ugly, and the elements of beauty which compose it.
Consequently, the ugly is unsuccessful expression. The paradox is true, that, in works of art that are failures, the beautiful is present as unity and the ugly as multiplicity. Thus, with regard to works of art that are more or less failures, we talk of qualities, that is to say of those parts of them that are beautiful. We do not talk thus of perfect works. It is in fact impossible to enumerate their qualities or to designate those parts of them that are beautiful. In them there is complete fusion: they have but one quality. Life circulates in the whole organism: it is not withdrawn into certain parts.
The qualities of works tha