THE GENERAL FACTOR IN AESTHETIC JUDGEMENTS1

Abstract

SEVERAL workers have recently been investigating the existence and nature of a ‘general factor’ in aesthetic appreciation. Dr Dewar has shown that both laymen and experts tend to put pictures of widely different merit in much the same order of liking; if their various rankings are correlated, and the resulting table factorized, we find that a large part of the variance is accounted for by a general factor(1). Other investigators have shown reason to assume the existence of a general factor which would be operative not only within one test, but between tests of different kinds of aesthetic appreciation (even after the influence of intelligence had been eliminated). They found that “the capacity for literary appreciation correlates. . .with pictorial and musical appreciation” ((%, p. 283). The general factor to be discussed here lies between these two factors, being more general than that discovered by Dr Dewar, but less extensive than that discovered b’y Williams, Winter & Woo&. Admitting that there is a general factor appearing within any one test of visual appreciation, we ask if that factor would extend to all other tests of visual appreciation as well; or whether it would be specific to the one test in which it was observed. Prof. Burt put the same question in the following form: “If we could brush aside all irrelevant associations, and take a completely detached view. . .would there be any solid grounds for preference left? ” ( (31, p. 289). Researches such as those mentioned above may seem to answer this question a fortiori, because if we admit the existence of an intersensory