" (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.
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