Another consequence of the confusion between the æsthetic fact and the physical fact is the theory of the _elementary forms of the beautiful._ If expression, if the beautiful, be indivisible, the physical fact on the contrary, in which it externalizes itself, can easily be divided and subdivided: for example, a painted surface, into lines and colours, groups and curves of lines, kinds of colours, and so on; a poem, into strophes, verses, feet, syllables; a piece of prose, into chapters, paragraphs, headings, periods, phrases, words and so on. The parts thus obtained are not æsthetic facts, but smaller physical facts, arbitrarily divided. If this path were followed and the confusion persisted in, we should end by concluding that the true elementary forms of the beautiful are _atoms._
The æsthetic law, several times promulgated, that beauty must have _bulk,_ could be invoked against the atoms. It cannot be the imperceptibility of the too small, or the inapprehensibility of the too large. But a greatness determined by perceptibility, not by measurement, implies a concept widely different from the mathematical. Indeed, what is called imperceptible and inapprehensible does not produce an impression, because it is not a real fact, but a concept: the demand for bulk in the beautiful is thus reduced to the actual presence of the physical fact, which serves for the reproduction of the beautiful.
[Sidenote: _Criticism of the search for the objective conditions of the beautiful._]
Continuing the search for the _physical laws_ or for the _objective conditions of the beautiful,_ it has been asked: To what physical facts does the beautiful correspond? To what the ugly? To what unions of tones, colours, sizes, mathematically determinable? Such inquiries are as if in Political Economy one were to seek for the laws of exchange in the physical nature of the objects exchanged. The persistent fruitlessness of the attempt should have given rise before long to some suspicion of its vanity. In our times, especially, necessity for an _inductive_ Æsthetic has been often proclaimed, of an Æsthetic starting _from below,_ proceeding like natural science and not jumping to its conclusions. Inductive? But Æsthetic has always been both inductive and deductive, like every philosophical science; induction and deduction cannot be separated, nor can they separately avail to characterize a true science. But the word "induction" was not pronounced here by chance. The intention was to imply that the æsthetic fact is really nothing but a physical fact, to be studied by the methods proper to the physical and natural sciences.