About the author …

Samuel Alexander (1859-1938), born in Australia, attended Balliol College, Oxford, and studied psychology with Hugo Müsterberg in Germany before his interests turned to science and philosophy. He taught at the University of Manchester for most of his life. In his magnum opus, Space, Time, and Deity, he attempts to found a comprehensive speculative metaphysical system upon an empirical method. Nature, he thought, can be explained as the emergence of levels of reality, of which space-time is the lowest level. The highest level, Deity, emerges from mind. In his Beauty and the Other Forms of Value, Alexander explains æsthetic value as a "tertiary quality"—namely, artistic value is the result of a natural impulse for imaginative contemplation of objects in the world.