"Mr.Darwin's work is one of those rare and capital achievements of intellect which effect a grave modification throughout all the highest departments of the realm of opinion...There is throughout the description and examination of Sexual Selection a way of speaking of beauty, which seems to us to be highly unphilosophical, because it assumes a certain theory of beauty, which the most competent modern thinkers are too far from accepting, to allow its assumption to be quite judicious...Why should we only find the aesthetic quality in birds wonderful, when it happens to coincide with our own?
In other words, why attribute to them conscious aesthetic qualities at all?
There is no more positive reason for attributing aesthetic consciousness to the Argus pheasant than there is for attributing to bees geometric consciousness of the hexagonal prisms and rhombic plates of the hive which they so marvellously construct.

Hence the phraseology which Mr.Darwin employs in this part of the subject, though not affecting the degree of probability which may belong to this theory, seems to us to be very loose scientifically, and philosophically most misleading."-- "Pall Mall Gazette.") This is not at all improbable, as it is almost a lifetime since I attended to the philosophy of aesthetics, and did not then think that I should ever make use of my conclusions.

Can you refer me to any one or two books (for my power of reading is not great) which would illumine me?
or can you explain in one or two sentences how I err?
Perhaps it would be best for me to explain what I mean by the sense of beauty in its lowest stage of development, and which can only apply to animals.

When an intense colour, or two tints in harmony, or a recurrent and symmetrical figure please the eye, or a single sweet note pleases the ear, I call this a sense of beauty; and with this meaning I have spoken (though I now see in not a sufficiently guarded manner) of a taste for the beautiful being the same in mankind (for all savages admire bits of bright cloth, beads, plumes, etc.) and in the lower animals.

If the blue and yellow plumage of a macaw (241/2.