E. Moore's
Principia Ethica (1903) that "the most valuable things, which we can know or imagine, are … the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects" (Moore 1903, p.237), which would become the creed of the Bloomsbury group of artists and intellectuals. Moore treated "aesthetic appreciation" as an "organic whole" consisting of consciousness of both the beautiful qualities of an object and the feeling of its beauty, an idea that is related to Santayana's notion of beauty as objectified pleasure; but Moore also held that beautiful objects are themselves organic unities, in the sense that the contemplation of the individual parts may have no value, but the contemplation of the whole loses value without the contemplation of those parts. Moore thus adopted a more restrictive analysis of the objects of aesthetic pleasure than had Santayana.
Moore influenced the critic Clive Bell, who in his 1914 book Art postulated a special aesthetic emotion in response to "significant form" in works of art. Edward Bullough, a professor of literature who in 1907 gave the first course on aesthetics at Cambridge, has also been considered a follower of Moore, but his theory is different from Bell's; according to Bullough's famous 1912 paper "'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle," distancing oneself from the most obvious emotions that might be aroused by some object, such as the emotion of fear in response to a fog at sea, does not allow one to enjoy some special aesthetic emotion, but rather opens oneself up to a whole range of other feelings and emotions that can be aroused by the very same object, thereby increasing the richness and intensity of one's emotional experience of life as a whole.
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