real or ideal, and it is here where Gendler directs most of our attention: to the simple things around us which we so often just take for granted. We rarely really "see" them, we hardly spend time contemplating them, and we, in our busy and messy contemporary world, ignore them for the most part and wonder if we're not missing something. Gendler certainly makes an important "philosophical" point (unwittingly or not) when she says that "Beauty, like every other quality -- courage, fear, ugliness, trust, truth, wisdom -- is a part of us and apart from us, inside us and outside us, personal and impersonal. Beauty invites us to build bridges and make connections between the senses and the soul, between contemplation and expression, between ourselves and the world." The great debate in aesthetics has always been the argument over subjectivity versus objectivity: Is beauty merely in the eye of the beholder, or is there something "out there" which, in fact, possesses the quality of beauty regardless of the beholder? Gendler appears to take the middle road on the issue and I agree with her: "Beauty . . . is a part of us and apart from us, inside us and outside us." Her book provides numerous examples to support her observation. Beauty is, however, a most elusive quality. Its nature is no tenuous that it always seems to escape in the very moment of its capture. There is hardly a term in any language which is used more and