For Bell and his fellow formalists, significant form is the only important artistic criterion. Where it comes to insulating the aesthetic from the erotic, many prominent philosophers in the 20th century have followed in Bell’s footsteps, even when they do not subscribe to his formalism. In The Principles of Art (1938), R. G. Collingwood observes how “the words ‘beauty’, ‘beautiful’, as actually used, have no aesthetic implication” since they often indicate “the satisfaction of some desire or the arousing of some emotion” (1938: 38–41). For Collingwood, a beautiful man or woman ordinarily means one whom we find sexually desirable. And he firmly states that this “has nothing whatever to do with aesthetic experience. It has to do with that other kind of experience that Plato called eros” (1938: 41). Similarly, Monroe Beardsley insisted on a strict divide between the two sorts of responses and revised his theory of aesthetic experience when it was pointed out to him that it did not exclude sexual experiences from the realm of the aesthetic (Beardsley 1982). Edward Bullough famously posited “psychical distance” as a prerequisite for experiencing art and concluded that