Beauty evokes desire. This should be emphasized for two reasons. First, beauty is not simply the invention of a fecund, unpremised, spontaneous exuberance of will, a desire that preexists and predisposes the object of its velleity or appetite (as certain contemporary schools of thought suggest), but precedes and elicits desire, supplicates and commands it (often in vain), and gives shape to the will that receives it. Second, it is genuinely desire, and not some ideally disinterested and dispirited state of contemplation, that beauty both calls for and answers to: though not a coarse,
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