to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solitude an eternal melancholy.  What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?  The attention is fixed upon a well-defined object, and all the effects it produces in the mind are easily regarded as powers or qualities of that object....  To a certain extent this kind of interest will center in the proper object of sexual passion, and in the special characteristics of the opposite sex[131]; and we find, accordingly, that woman is the most lovely object to man, and man, if female modesty would confess it, the most interesting to woman.  But the effects of so fundamental and primitive a reaction are much more general.  Sex is not the only object of sexual passion.  When love lacks its specific object, when it does not yet understand itself, or has been sacrificed to some other interest, we see the stifled fire bursting out in various directions....  Passion then overflows and visibly floods those neighboring regions which it had always secretly watered.  For the same nervous organization which sex involves, with its necessarily wide branchings and associations in the brain, must be partially stimulated by other objects than its specific or ultimate one; especially in man, who, unlike some of the lower animals, has not his instincts clearly distinct and intermittent, but always partially active, and never active in isolation.  We may say, then, that for man all nature is a secondary object of sexual passion, and that to this fact the beauty of nature is largely due.” (G.  Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, pp. 59-62.)

Not only is the general fact of sexual attraction an essential element of aesthetic contemplation, as Santayana remarks, but we have to recognize also that specific sexual emotion properly comes within the aesthetic field.  It is quite erroneous, as Groos well points out, to assert that sexual emotion has no aesthetic value.  On the contrary, it has quite as much value as the emotion of terror or of pity.  Such emotion, must, however, be duly subordinated to the total aesthetic effect. (K.  Groos, Der AEsthetische Genuss, p. 151.)

“The idea of beauty,” Remy de Gourmont says, “is not an unmixed idea; it is intimately united with the idea of carnal pleasure.  Stendhal obscurely perceived this when he defined beauty as ’a promise of happiness.’  Beauty is a woman, and women themselves have carried docility to men so far as to accept this aphorism which they can only understand in extreme sexual perversion....  Beauty is so sexual that the only uncontested works of art are those that simply show the human body in its nudity.  By its perseverance in remaining purely sexual Greek statuary has placed itself forever above all discussion.  It is beautiful because it is a beautiful human body, such a one as every man or every woman would desire