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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Beautiful, by Vernon Lee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Beautiful
+       An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics
+
+Author: Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: October 17, 2008 [EBook #26942]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEAUTIFUL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ruth Hart
+
+
+
+
+[Note:  for this online edition I have moved the Table of Contents to
+the beginning of the text and slightly modified it to conform with the
+online format.  I have also made two spelling corrections:
+"chippendale" to "Chippendale" and "closely interpendent" to
+"closely interdependent."]
+
+
+
+THE BEAUTIFUL
+
+AN INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGICAL AESTHETICS
+
+BY
+
+VERNON LEE
+
+
+Author of
+"Beauty and Ugliness"
+"Laurus Nobilis"
+etc.
+
+
+Cambridge:
+at the University Press
+New York:
+G.P. Putnam's Sons
+1913
+
+
+[Illustration: title page]
+
+
+_With the exception of the coat of arms
+at the foot, the design on the title page is a
+reproduction of one used by the earliest known
+Cambridge printer, John Siberch,_ 1521
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+       Preface and Apology                                 v
+I.     The Adjective "Beautiful"                           1
+II.    Contemplative Satisfaction                          8
+III.   Aspects versus Things                              14
+IV.    Sensations                                         22
+V.     Perception of Relations                            29
+VI.    Elements of Shape                                  35
+VII.   Facility and Difficulty of Grasping                48
+VIII.  Subject and Object, or, Nominative and Accusative  55
+IX.    Empathy (Einfuehlung)                               61
+X.     The Movement of Lines                              70
+XI.    The Character of Shapes                            78
+XII.   From the Shape to the Thing                        84
+XIII.  From the Thing to the Shape                        90
+XIV.   The Aims of Art                                    98
+XV.    Attention to Shapes                               106
+XVI.   Information about Things                          111
+XVII.  Co-operation of Things and Shapes                 117
+XVIII. Aesthetic Responsiveness                          128
+XIX.   The Storage and Transfer of Emotion               139
+XX.    Aesthetic Irradiation and Purification            147
+XXI.   Conclusion (Evolutional)                          153
+       Bibliography                                      156
+       Index                                             157
+
+
+
+PREFACE AND APOLOGY
+
+I HAVE tried in this little volume to explain aesthetic preference,
+particularly as regards visible shapes, by the facts of mental science.
+But my explanation is addressed to readers in whom I have no right
+to expect a previous knowledge of psychology, particularly in its
+more modern developments. I have therefore based my explanation
+of the problems of aesthetics as much as possible upon mental facts
+familiar, or at all events easily intelligible, to the lay reader. Now
+mental facts thus available are by no means the elementary
+processes with which analytical and, especially experimental,
+psychology has dealings. They are, on the contrary, the everyday,
+superficial and often extremely confused views which practical life
+and its wholly unscientific vocabulary present of those ascertained
+or hypothetical scientific facts. I have indeed endeavoured (for
+instance in the analysis of perception as distinguished from
+sensation) to impart some rudiments of psychology in the course of
+my aesthetical explanation, and I have avoided, as much as possible,
+misleading the reader about such fearful complexes and cruxes as
+_memory, association_ and _imagination._ But I have been obliged
+to speak in terms intelligible to the lay reader, and I am fully aware
+that these terms correspond only very approximately to what is, or at
+present passes as, psychological fact. I would therefore beg the
+psychologist (to whom I offer this little volume as a possible slight
+addition even to his stock of facts and hypotheses) to understand that
+in speaking, for instance, of Empathy as involving a _thought_ of
+certain activities, I mean merely that whatever happens has the same
+result _as if we thought_; and that the processes, whatever they may
+be (also in the case of measuring, comparing and co-ordinating),
+translate themselves, _when they are detected,_ into _thoughts;_ but
+that I do not in the least pre-judge the question whether the
+processes, the "thoughts," the measuring, comparing etc. exist on
+subordinate planes of consciousness or whether they are mainly
+physiological and only occasionally abutting in conscious resultants.
+Similarly, lack of space and the need for clearness have obliged me
+to write as if shape-preference invariably necessitated the detailed
+process of ocular perception, instead of being due, as is doubtless
+most often the case, to every kind of associative abbreviation and
+equivalence of processes.
+
+          VERNON LEE
+     Maiano _near_ Florence,_
+          Easter_ 1913.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE ADJECTIVE "BEAUTIFUL"
+
+THIS little book, like the great branch of mental science to which it
+is an introduction, makes no attempt to "form the taste" of the public
+and still less to direct the doings of the artist. It deals not with
+_ought_ but with _is,_ leaving to Criticism the inference from the
+latter to the former. It does not pretend to tell how things can be
+made beautiful or even how we can recognise that things _are_
+beautiful. It takes Beauty as already existing and enjoyed, and seeks
+to analyse and account for Beauty's existence and enjoyment. More
+strictly speaking, it analyses and accounts for Beauty not inasmuch
+as existing in certain objects and processes, but rather as calling
+forth (and being called forth by) a particular group of mental
+activities and habits. It does not ask: What are the peculiarities of the
+things (and the proceedings) which we call _Beautiful?_ but: What
+are the peculiarities of our thinking and feeling when in the presence
+of a thing to which we apply this adjective? The study of single
+beautiful things, and even more, the comparison of various
+categories thereof, is indeed one-half of all scientific aesthetics, but
+only inasmuch as it adds to our knowledge of the particular mental
+activities which such "Beautiful" (and vice versa "Ugly") things
+elicit in us. For it is on the nature of this active response on our own
+part that depends the application of those terms _Beautiful_ and
+_Ugly_ in every single instance; and indeed their application in any
+instances whatsoever, their very existence in the human vocabulary.
+
+In accordance with this programme I shall not start with a formal
+definition of the word _Beautiful,_ but ask: on what sort of
+occasions we make use of it. Evidently, on _occasions when we feel
+satisfaction rather than dissatisfaction,_ satisfaction meaning
+willingness either to prolong or to repeat the particular experience
+which has called forth that word; and meaning also that if it comes
+to a choice between two or several experiences, we _prefer_ the
+experience thus marked by the word _Beautiful. Beautiful,_ we may
+therefore formulate, _implies on our part an attitude of satisfaction
+and preference._ But there are other words which imply that much;
+first and foremost the words, in reality synonyms, USEFUL and
+GOOD. I call these synonyms because _good_ always implies
+_good for,_ or _good in,_ that is to say fitness for a purpose, even
+though that purpose may be masked under _conforming to a
+standard_ or _obeying a commandment,_ since the standard or
+commandment represents not the caprice of a community, a race or a
+divinity, but some (real or imaginary) utility of a less immediate
+kind. So much for the meaning of _good_ when implying standards
+and commandments; ninety-nine times out of a hundred there is,
+however, no such implication, and _good_ means nothing more than
+_satisfactory in the way of use and advantage._ Thus a _good_ road
+is a road we prefer because it takes us to our destination quickly and
+easily. A _good_ speech is one we prefer because it succeeds in
+explaining or persuading. And a _good_ character (good friend,
+father, husband, citizen) is one that gives satisfaction by the
+fulfilment of moral obligations.
+
+But note the difference when we come to _Beautiful._ A _beautiful_
+road is one we prefer because it affords views we like to look at; its
+being devious and inconvenient will not prevent its being
+_beautiful._ A _beautiful_ speech is one we like to hear or
+remember, although it may convince or persuade neither us nor
+anybody. A _beautiful_ character is one we like to think about but
+which may never practically help anyone, if for instance, it exists
+not in real life but in a novel. Thus the adjective _Beautiful_ implies
+_an attitude of preference, but not an attitude of present or future
+turning to our purposes._ There is even a significant lack of
+symmetry in the words employed (at all events in English, French
+and German) to distinguish what we like from what we dislike in the
+way of weather. For weather which makes us uncomfortable and
+hampers our comings and goings by rain, wind or mud, is described
+as _bad;_ while the opposite kind of weather is called _beautiful,
+fine,_ or _fair,_ as if the greater comfort, convenience, usefulness of
+such days were forgotten in the lively satisfaction afforded to our
+mere contemplation.
+
+_Our mere contemplation!_ Here we have struck upon the main
+difference between our attitude when we use the word _good_ or
+_useful,_ and when we use the word _beautiful._ And we can add to
+our partial formula "beautiful implies satisfaction and preference"--the
+distinguishing predicate--"_of a contemplative kind._" This
+general statement will be confirmed by an everyday anomaly in our
+use of the word beautiful; and the examination of this seeming
+exception will not only exemplify what I have said about our
+attitude when employing that word, but add to this information the
+name of the emotion corresponding with that attitude: the emotion
+of _admiration._ For the selfsame object or proceeding may
+sometimes be called _good_ and sometimes _beautiful,_ according
+as the mental attitude is practical or contemplative. While we
+admonish the traveller to take a certain road because he will find it
+_good,_ we may hear that same road described by an enthusiastic
+coachman as _beautiful, anglice fine_ or _splendid,_ because there
+is no question of immediate use, and the road's qualities are merely
+being contemplated with admiration. Similarly, we have all of us
+heard an engineer apply to a piece of machinery, and even a surgeon
+to an operation, the apparently far-fetched adjective Beautiful, or
+one of the various equivalents, fine, splendid, glorious (even
+occasionally _jolly!)_ by which Englishmen express their
+admiration. The change of word represents a change of attitude. The
+engineer is no longer bent upon using the machine, nor the surgeon
+estimating the advantages of the operation. Each of these highly
+practical persons has switched off his practicality, if but for an
+imperceptible fraction of time and in the very middle of a practical
+estimation or even of practice itself. The machine or operation, the
+skill, the inventiveness, the fitness for its purposes, are being
+considered _apart from action,_ and advantage, means and time,
+to-day or yesterday; _platonically_ we may call it from the first great
+teacher of aesthetics. They are being, in one word, contemplated
+with admiration. And _admiration_ is the rough and ready name for
+the mood, however transient, for the emotion, however faint,
+wherewith we greet whatever makes us contemplate, because
+contemplation happens to give satisfaction. The satisfaction may be
+a mere skeleton of the "I'd rather than not" description; or it may be
+a massive alteration in our being, radiating far beyond the present,
+evoking from the past similar conditions to corroborate it; storing
+itself up for the future; penetrating, like the joy of a fine day, into
+our animal spirits, altering pulse, breath, gait, glance and demeanour;
+and transfiguring our whole momentary outlook on life. But,
+superficial or overwhelming, _this hind of satisfaction connected
+with, the word Beautiful is always of the Contemplative order._
+
+And upon the fact we have thus formulated depend, as we shall see,
+most of the other facts and formulae of our subject.
+
+This essentially unpractical attitude accompanying the use of the
+word _Beautiful_ has led metaphysical aestheticians to two famous,
+and I think, quite misleading theories. The first of these defines
+aesthetic appreciation as _disinterested interest,_ gratuitously
+identifying self-interest with the practical pursuit of advantages we
+have not yet got; and overlooking the fact that such appreciation
+implies enjoyment and is so far the very reverse of disinterested.
+The second philosophical theory (originally Schiller's, and revived
+by Herbert Spencer) takes advantage of the non-practical attitude
+connected with the word _Beautiful_ to define art and its enjoyment
+as a kind of _play._ Now although leisure and freedom from cares
+are necessary both for play and for aesthetic appreciation, the latter
+differs essentially from the former by its contemplative nature. For
+although it may be possible to watch _other people_ playing football
+or chess or bridge in a purely contemplative spirit and with the
+deepest admiration, even as the engineer or surgeon may
+contemplate the perfections of a machine or an operation, yet the
+concentration on the aim and the next moves constitutes on the part
+of the players _themselves_ an eminently practical state of mind,
+one diametrically opposed to contemplation, as I hope to make
+evident in the next section.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CONTEMPLATIVE SATISFACTION
+
+WE have thus defined the word _Beautiful_ as implying an attitude
+of contemplative satisfaction, marked by a feeling, sometimes
+amounting to an _emotion,_ of admiration; and so far contrasted it
+with the practical attitude implied by the word _good._ But we
+require to know more about the distinctive peculiarities of
+contemplation as such, by which, moreover, it is distinguished not
+merely from the practical attitude, but also from the scientific one.
+
+Let us get some rough and ready notions on this subject by watching
+the behaviour and listening to the remarks of three imaginary
+wayfarers in front of a view, which they severally consider in the
+practical, the scientific and the aesthetic manner. The view was from
+a hill-top in the neighbourhood of Rome or of Edinburgh, whichever
+the Reader can best realise; and in its presence the three travellers
+halted and remained for a moment absorbed each in his thoughts.
+
+"It will take us a couple of hours to get home on foot"--began one of
+the three. "We might have been back for tea-time if only there had
+been a tram and a funicular. And that makes me think: Why not start
+a joint-stock company to build them? There must be water-power in
+these hills; the hill people could keep cows and send milk and butter
+to town. Also houses could be built for people whose work takes
+them to town, but who want good air for their children; the
+hire-purchase system, you know. It might prove a godsend and a capital
+investment, though I suppose some people would say it spoilt the
+view. The idea is quite a _good_ one. I shall get an expert--"
+
+"These hills," put in the second man--"are said to be part of an
+ancient volcano. I don't know whether that theory is _true!_ It would
+be _interesting_ to examine whether the summits have been ground
+down in places by ice, and whether there are traces of volcanic
+action at different geological epochs; the plain, I suppose, has been
+under the sea at no very distant period. It is also _interesting_ to
+notice, as we can up here, how the situation of the town is explained
+by the river affording easier shipping on a coast poor in natural
+harbours; moreover, this has been the inevitable meeting-place of
+seafaring and pastoral populations. These investigations would
+prove, as I said, remarkably full of interest."
+
+"I wish"--complained the third wayfarer, but probably only to
+himself--"I wish these men would hold their tongues and let one
+enjoy this exquisite place without diverting one's attention to _what
+might be done_ or to _how it all came about._ They don't seem to
+feel how _beautiful_ it all is." And he concentrated himself on
+contemplation of the landscape, his delight brought home by a stab
+of reluctance to leave.
+
+Meanwhile one of his companions fell to wondering whether there
+really was sufficient pasture for dairy-farming and water-power for
+both tramway and funicular, and where the necessary capital could
+be borrowed; and the other one hunted about for marks of
+stratification and upheaval, and ransacked his memory for historical
+data about the various tribes originally inhabiting that country.
+
+"I suppose you're a painter and regretting you haven't brought your
+sketching materials?" said the scientific man, always interested in
+the causes of phenomena, even such trifling ones as a man
+remaining quiet before a landscape.
+
+"I reckon you are one of those literary fellows, and are planning out
+where you can use up a description of this place"--corrected the
+rapid insight of the practical man, accustomed to weigh people's
+motives in case they may be turned to use.
+
+"I am _not_ a painter, and I'm _not_ a writer"--exclaimed the third
+traveller, "and I thank Heaven I'm not! For if I were I might be
+trying to engineer a picture or to match adjectives, instead of merely
+enjoying all this beauty. Not but that I should like to have a sketch
+or a few words of description for when I've turned my back upon it.
+And Heaven help me, I really believe that when we are all back in
+London I may be quite glad to hear you two talking about your
+tramway-funicular company and your volcanic and glacial action,
+because your talk will evoke in my mind the remembrance of this
+place and moment which you have done your best to spoil for me--"
+
+"That's what it is to be aesthetic"--said the two almost in the same
+breath.
+
+"And that, I suppose"--answered the third with some animosity--"is
+what you mean by being practical or scientific."
+
+Now the attitude of mind of the practical man and of the man of
+science, though differing so obviously from one another (the first
+bent upon producing new and advantageous _results,_ the second
+examining, without thought of advantage, into possible _causes),_
+both differed in the same way from the attitude of the man who was
+merely contemplating what he called the beauty of the scene. They
+were, as he complained, thinking of _what might be done_ and of
+_how it had all come about._ That is to say they were both thinking
+_away_ from that landscape. The scientific man actually turned his
+back to it in examining first one rock, then another. The practical
+man must have looked both at the plain in front and at the hill he
+was on, since he judged that there was pasture and water-power, and
+that the steepness required supplementing the tramway by a
+funicular. But besides the different items of landscape, and the same
+items under different angles, which were thus offered to these two
+men's bodily eyes, there was a far greater variety, and rapider
+succession of items and perspectives presented to the eyes of their
+spirit: the practical man's mental eye seeing not only the hills, plain,
+and town with details not co-existing in perspective or even in time,
+but tram-lines and funiculars in various stages of progress,
+dairy-products, pasture, houses, dynamos, waterfalls, offices,
+advertisements, cheques, etc., etc., and the scientific man's inner
+vision glancing with equal speed from volcanoes to ice-caps and
+seas in various stages of geological existence, besides minerals
+under the microscope, inhabitants in prehistoric or classic garb, let
+alone probably pages of books and interiors of libraries. Moreover,
+most, if not all these mental images (blocking out from attention the
+really existing landscape) could be called images only by courtesy,
+swished over by the mental eye as by an express train, only just
+enough seen to know what it was, or perhaps nothing seen at all,
+mere words filling up gaps in the chain of thought. So that what
+satisfaction there might be in the case was not due to these rapidly
+scampered through items, but to the very fact of getting to the next
+one, and to a looming, dominating goal, an ultimate desired result, to
+wit, pounds, shillings, and pence in the one case, and a coherent
+explanation in the other. In both cases equally there was a
+kaleidoscopic and cinematographic succession of aspects, but of
+aspects of which only one detail perhaps was noticed. Or, more
+strictly speaking, there was no interest whatever in aspects as such,
+but only in the possibilities of action which these aspects implied;
+whether actions future and personally profitable, like building
+tram-lines and floating joint-stock companies, or actions mainly past and
+quite impersonally interesting, like those of extinct volcanoes or
+prehistoric civilisations.
+
+Now let us examine the mental attitude of the third man, whom the
+two others had first mistaken for an artist or writer, and then
+dismissed as an aesthetic person.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ASPECTS _VERSUS_ THINGS
+
+HAVING settled upon a particular point of view as the one he liked
+best, he remained there in contemplation of the aspect it afforded
+him. Had he descended another twenty minutes, or looked through
+powerful glasses, he would have seen the plain below as a
+juxtaposition of emerald green, raw Sienna, and pale yellow,
+whereas, at the distance where he chose to remain, its colours fused
+into indescribably lovely lilacs and russets. Had he moved freely
+about he would have become aware that a fanlike arrangement of
+sharply convergent lines, tempting his eye to run rapidly into their
+various angles, must be thought of as a chessboard of dikes, hedges,
+and roads, dull as if drawn with a ruler on a slate. Also that the
+foothills, instead of forming a monumental mass with the mountains
+behind them, lay in a totally different plane and distracted the
+attention by their aggressive projection. While, as if to spoil the
+aspect still more, he would have been forced to recognise (as Ruskin
+explains by his drawing of the cottage roof and the Matterhorn peak)
+that the exquisitely phrased skyline of the furthermost hills, picked
+up at rhythmical intervals into sharp crests, dropping down merely
+to rush up again in long concave curves, was merely an illusion of
+perspective, nearer lines seeming higher and further ones lower, let
+alone that from a balloon you would see only flattened mounds. But
+to how things might look from a balloon, or under a microscope,
+that man did not give one thought, any more than to how they might
+look after a hundred years of tramways and funiculars or how they
+had looked before thousands of years of volcanic and glacial action.
+He was satisfied with the wonderfully harmonised scheme of light
+and colour, the pattern (more and more detailed, more and more
+co-ordinated with every additional exploring glance) of keenly
+thrusting, delicately yielding lines, meeting as purposefully as if
+they had all been alive and executing some great, intricate dance. He
+did not concern himself whether what he was looking at was an
+aggregate of things; still less what might be these things' other
+properties. He was not concerned with things at all, but only with a
+particular appearance (he did not care whether it answered to reality),
+only with one (he did not want to know whether there might be any
+other) _aspect._
+
+For, odd as it may sound, a _Thing_ is both much more and much
+less than an _Aspect._ Much more, because a _Thing_ really means
+not only qualities of its own and reactions of ours which are actual
+and present, but a far greater number and variety thereof which are
+potential. Much _less,_ on the other hand, because of these potential
+qualities and reactions constituting a Thing only a minimum need be
+thought of at any given time; instead of which, an aspect is all there,
+its qualities closely interdependent, and our reactions entirely taken
+up in connecting them as whole and parts. A rose, for instance, is
+not merely a certain assemblage of curves and straight lines and
+colours, seen as the painter sees it, at a certain angle, petals masking
+part of stem, leaf protruding above bud: it is the possibility of other
+combinations of shapes, including those seen when the rose (or the
+person looking) is placed head downwards. Similarly it is the
+possibility of certain sensations of resistance, softness, moisture,
+pricking if we attempt to grasp it, of a certain fragrance if we breathe
+in the air. It is the possibility of turning into a particular fruit, with
+the possibility of our finding that fruit bitter and non-edible; of being
+developed from cuttings, pressed in a book, made a present of or
+cultivated for lucre. Only one of these groups of possibilities may
+occupy our thoughts, the rest not glanced at, or only glanced at
+subsequently; but if, on trial, any of these grouped possibilities
+disappoint us, we decide that this is not a real rose, but a paper rose,
+or a painted one, or no rose at all, but some _other thing._ For, so far
+as our consciousness is concerned, _things_ are merely groups of
+actual and potential reactions on our own part, that is to say of
+expectations which experience has linked together in more or less
+stable groups. The practical man and the man of science in my fable,
+were both of them dealing with _Things_: passing from one group
+of potential reaction to another, hurrying here, dallying there, till of
+the actual _aspect_ of the landscape there remained nothing in their
+thoughts, trams and funiculars in the future, volcanoes and icecaps
+in the past, having entirely altered all that; only the material
+constituents and the geographical locality remaining as the unshifted
+item in those much pulled about bundles of thoughts of possibilities.
+
+Every _thing_ may have a great number of very different _Aspects;_
+and some of these _Aspects_ may invite contemplation, as that
+landscape invited the third man to contemplate it; while other
+_aspects_ (say the same place after a proper course of tramways and
+funiculars and semi-detached residences, or _before_ the needful
+volcanic and glacial action) may be such as are dismissed or slurred
+as fast as possible. Indeed, with the exception of a very few cubes
+not in themselves especially attractive, I cannot remember any
+_things_ which do not present quite as many displeasing aspects as
+pleasing ones. The most beautiful building is not beautiful if stood
+on its head; the most beautiful picture is not beautiful looked at
+through a microscope or from too far off; the most beautiful melody
+is not beautiful if begun at the wrong end. . . . Here the Reader may
+interrupt: "What nonsense! Of course the building _is_ a building
+only when right side up; the picture isn't a picture any longer under a
+microscope; the melody isn't a melody except begun at the
+beginning"--all which means that when we speak of a building, a
+picture, or a melody, we are already implicitly speaking, no longer
+of a _Thing,_ but of one of the possible _Aspects_ of a thing; _and
+that when we say that a thing is beautiful, we mean that it affords
+one or more aspects which we contemplate with satisfaction._ But if
+a beautiful mountain or a beautiful woman could only be
+_contemplated,_ if the mountain could not also be climbed or
+tunnelled, if the woman could not also get married, bear children
+and have (or not have!) a vote, we should say that the mountain and
+the woman were not _real things._ Hence we come to the conclusion,
+paradoxical only as long as we fail to define what we are talking
+about, _that what we contemplate as beautiful is an Aspect of a
+Thing, but never a Thing itself._ In other words: Beautiful is an
+adjective applicable to Aspects not to Things, or to Things only,
+inasmuch as we consider them as possessing (among other
+potentialities) beautiful Aspects. So that we can now formulate:
+_The word beautiful implies the satisfaction derived from the
+contemplation not of things but of aspects._
+
+This summing up has brought us to the very core of our subject; and
+I should wish the Reader to get it by heart, until he grow
+familiarised therewith in the course of our further examinations.
+Before proceeding upon these, I would, however, ask him to reflect
+how this last formula of ours bears upon the old, seemingly endless,
+squabble as to whether or not beauty has anything to do with truth,
+and whether art, as certain moralists contend, is a school of lying.
+For _true_ or _false_ is a judgment of existence; it refers to
+_Things;_ it implies that besides the qualities and reactions shown
+or described, our further action or analysis will call forth certain
+other groups of qualities and reactions constituting the _thing which
+is said to exist._ But aspects, in the case in which I have used that
+word, _are_ what they are and do not necessarily imply anything
+beyond their own peculiarities. The words _true_ or _false_ can be
+applied to them only with the meaning of _aspects truly existing_ or
+_not truly existing;_ _i.e._ aspects of which it is true or not to _say
+that they exist._ But as to an aspect being true or false in the sense
+of _misleading,_ that question refers not to the _aspect_ itself, but to
+the thing of which the aspect is taken as a part and a sign. Now the
+contemplation of the mere aspect, the beauty (or ugliness) of the
+aspect, does not itself necessitate or imply any such reference to a
+thing. Our contemplation of the beauty of a statue representing a
+Centaur may indeed be disturbed by the reflexion that a creature
+with two sets of lungs and digestive organs would be a monster and
+not likely to grow to the age of having a beard. But this disturbing
+thought need not take place. And when it takes place it is not part of
+our contemplation of the _aspect_ of that statue; it is, on the contrary,
+outside it, an excursion away from it due to our inveterate (and very
+necessary) habit of interrupting the contemplation of _Aspects_ by
+the thinking and testing of _Things._ The Aspect never implied the
+existence of a Thing beyond itself; it did not affirm that anything
+was true, _i.e._ that anything could or would happen besides the fact
+of our contemplation. In other words the formula that _beautiful is
+an adjective applying only to aspects,_ shows us that art can be
+truthful or untruthful only in so far as art (as is often the case)
+deliberately sets to making statements about the existence and nature
+of Things. If Art says "Centaurs can be born and grow up to man's
+estate with two sets of respiratory and digestive organs"--then Art is
+telling lies. Only, before accusing it of being a liar, better make sure
+that the statement about the possibility of centaurs has been intended
+by the Art, and not merely read into it by ourselves.
+
+But more of this when we come to the examination of Subject and
+Form.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SENSATIONS
+
+IN the contemplation of the _Aspect_ before him, what gave that
+aesthetic man the most immediate and undoubted pleasure was its
+colour, or, more correctly speaking, its colours. Psycho-Physiologists
+have not yet told us why colours, taken singly and apart
+from their juxtaposition, should possess so extraordinary a
+power over what used to be called our animal spirits, and through
+them over our moods; and we can only guess from analogy with
+what is observed in plants, as well as from the nature of the
+phenomenon itself, that various kinds of luminous stimulation must
+have some deep chemical repercussion throughout the human
+organism. The same applies, though in lesser degree, to sounds,
+quite independent of their juxtaposition as melodies and harmonies.
+As there are colours which _feel, i.e._ make _us_ feel, more or less
+warm or cool, colours which are refreshing or stifling, depressing or
+exhilarating quite independent of any associations, so also there are
+qualities of sound which enliven us like the blare of the trumpet, or
+harrow us like the quaver of the accordion. Similarly with regard to
+immediacy of effect: the first chords of an organ will change our
+whole mode of being like the change of light and colour on first
+entering a church, although the music which that organ is playing
+may, after a few seconds of listening, bore us beyond endurance;
+and the architecture of that church, once we begin to take stock of it,
+entirely dispel that first impression made by the church's light and
+colour. It is on account of this doubtless physiological power of
+colour and sound, this way which they have of invading and
+subjugating us with or without our consent and long before our
+conscious co-operation, that the Man-on-the-Hill's pleasure in the
+aspect before him was, as I have said, first of all, pleasure in colour.
+Also, because pleasure in colour, like pleasure in mere sound-quality
+or _timbre,_ is accessible to people who never go any further in their
+aesthetic preference. Children, as every one knows, are sensitive to
+colours, long before they show the faintest sensitiveness for shapes.
+And the timbre of a perfect voice in a single long note or shake used
+to bring the house down in the days of our grandparents, just as the
+subtle orchestral blendings of Wagner entrance hearers incapable of
+distinguishing the notes of a chord and sometimes even incapable of
+following a modulation.
+
+The Man on the Hill, therefore, received immediate pleasure from
+the colours of the landscape. _Received_ pleasure, rather than
+_took_ it, since colours, like smells, seem, as I have said, to invade
+us, and insist upon pleasing whether we want to be pleased or not. In
+this meaning of the word we may be said to be _passive_ to sound
+and colour quality: our share in the effects of these sensations, as in
+the effect of agreeable temperatures, contacts and tastes, is a
+question of bodily and mental reflexes in which our conscious
+activity, our voluntary attention, play no part: we are not _doing,_
+but _done to_ by those stimulations from without; and the pleasure
+or displeasure which they set up in us is therefore one which we
+_receive,_ as distinguished from one which _we take._
+
+Before passing on to the pleasure which the Man on the Hill _did
+take,_ as distinguished from thus passively _receiving,_ from the
+aspect before him, before investigating into the activities to which
+this other kind of pleasure, _pleasure taken, not received,_ is due,
+we must dwell a little longer on the colours which delighted him,
+and upon the importance or unimportance of those colours with
+regard to that _Aspect_ he was contemplating.
+
+These colours--particularly a certain rain-washed blue, a pale lilac
+and a faded russet--gave him, as I said, immediate and massive
+pleasure like that of certain delicious tastes and smells, indeed
+anyone who had watched him attentively might have noticed that he
+was making rather the same face as a person rolling, as Meredith
+says, a fine vintage against his palate, or drawing in deeper draughts
+of exquisitely scented air; he himself, if not too engaged in looking,
+might have noticed the accompanying sensations in his mouth,
+throat and nostrils; all of which, his only active response to the
+colour, was merely the attempt to _receive more_ of the already
+received sensation. But this pleasure which he received from the
+mere colours of the landscape was the same pleasure which they
+would have given him if he had met them in so many skeins of silk;
+the more complex pleasure due to their juxtaposition, was the
+pleasure he might have had if those skeins, instead of being on
+separate leaves of a pattern-book, had been lying tangled together in
+an untidy work-basket. He might then probably have said, "Those
+are exactly the colours, and in much the same combination, as in
+that landscape we saw such and such a day, at such and such a
+season and hour, from the top of that hill." But he would never have
+said (or been crazy if he had) "Those skeins of silk are the landscape
+we saw in that particular place and oh that particular occasion." Now
+the odd thing is that he would have used that precise form of words,
+"that is the landscape," etc. etc., if you had shown him a pencil
+drawing or a photograph taken from that particular place and point
+of view. And similarly if you had made him look through stained
+glass which changed the pale blue, pale lilac and faded russet into
+emerald green and blood red. He would have exclaimed at the loss
+of those exquisite colours when you showed him the monochrome,
+and perhaps have sworn that all his pleasure was spoilt when you
+forced him to look through that atrocious glass. But he would have
+identified the aspect as the one he had seen before; just as even the
+least musical person would identify "God save the King" whether
+played with three sharps on the flute or with four flats on the
+trombone.
+
+There is therefore in an _Aspect_ something over and above the
+quality of the colours (or in a piece of music, of the sounds) in
+which that aspect is, at any particular moment, embodied for your
+senses; something which can be detached from the particular colours
+or sounds and re-embodied in other colours or sounds, existing
+meanwhile in a curious potential schematic condition in our memory.
+That something is _Shape._
+
+It is Shape which we contemplate; and it is only because they enter
+into shapes that colours and sounds, as distinguished from
+temperatures, textures, tastes and smells, can be said to be
+contemplated at all. Indeed if we apply to single isolated colour or
+sound-qualities (that blue or russet, or the mere timbre of a voice or
+an orchestra) the adjective _beautiful_ while we express our liking
+for smells, tastes, temperatures and textures merely by the adjectives
+_agreeable, delicious_; this difference in our speech is doubtless due
+to the fact that colours or sounds are more often than not connected
+each with other colours or other sounds into a Shape and thereby
+become subject to contemplation more frequently than temperatures,
+textures, smells and tastes which cannot themselves be grouped into
+shapes, and are therefore objects of contemplation only when
+associated with colours and sounds, as for instance, the smell of
+burning weeds in a description of autumnal sights, or the cool
+wetness of a grotto in the perception of its darkness and its murmur
+of waters.
+
+On dismissing the practical and the scientific man because they were
+_thinking away from aspects to things,_ I attempted to inventory the
+_aspect_ in whose contemplation their aesthetic companion had
+remained absorbed. There were the colours, that delicious
+recently-washed blue, that lilac and russet, which gave the man his
+immediate shock of passive and (as much as smell and taste) bodily
+pleasure. But besides these my inventory contained another kind of
+item: what I described as a fan-like arrangement of sharply
+convergent lines and an exquisitely phrased sky-line of hills, picked
+up at rhythmical intervals into sharp crests and dropping down
+merely to rush up again in long rapid concave curves. And besides
+all this, there was the outline of a distant mountain, rising flamelike
+against the sky. It was all these items made up of _lines_ (skyline,
+outline, and lines of perspective!) which remained unchanged when
+the colours were utterly changed by looking through stained glass,
+and unchanged also when the colouring was reduced to the barest
+monochrome of a photograph or a pencil drawing; nay remained the
+same despite all changes of scale in that almost colourless
+presentment of them. Those items of the aspect were, as we all know,
+_Shapes._ And with altered colours, and colours diminished to just
+enough for each line to detach itself from its ground, those Shapes
+could be contemplated and called beautiful.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+PERCEPTION OF RELATIONS
+
+WHY should this be the case? Briefly, because colours (and sounds)
+as such are forced upon us by external stimulation of our organs of
+sight and hearing, neither more nor less than various temperatures,
+textures, tastes and smells are forced upon us from without through
+the nervous and cerebral mechanism connected with our skin,
+muscle, palate and nose. Whereas shapes instead of being thus nilly
+willy _seen_ or _heard,_ are, at least until we know them, _looked_
+at or _listened_ to, that is to say _taken in_ or _grasped,_ by mental
+and bodily activities which meet, but may also refuse to meet, those
+sense stimulations. Moreover, because these mental and bodily
+activities, being our own, can be rehearsed in what we call our
+memory without the repetition of the sensory stimulations which
+originally started them, and even in the presence of different ones.
+
+In terms of mental science, colour and sound, like temperature,
+texture, taste and smell, are _sensations_; while _shape_ is, in the
+most complete sense, a _perception._ This distinction between
+_sensation_ and _perception_ is a technicality of psychology; but
+upon it rests the whole question why shapes can be contemplated
+and afford the satisfaction connected with the word _beautiful,_
+while colours and sounds, except as grouped or groupable into
+shapes, cannot. Moreover this distinction will prepare us for
+understanding the main fact of all psychological aesthetics: namely
+that the satisfaction or the dissatisfaction which we get from shapes
+is satisfaction or dissatisfaction in what are, directly or indirectly,
+activities of our own.
+
+Etymologically and literally, _perception_ means the act of
+_grasping_ or _taking_ in, and also the result of that action. But
+when we thus _perceive_ a shape, what is it precisely that we grasp
+or take in? At first it might seem to be the _sensations_ in which that
+form is embodied. But a moment's reflection will show that this
+cannot be the case, since the sensations are furnished us simply
+without our performing any act of perception, thrust on us from
+outside, and, unless our sensory apparatus and its correlated brain
+centre were out of order, received by us passively, nilly willy, the
+Man on the Hill being invaded by the sense of that blue, that lilac
+and that russet exactly as he might have been invaded by the smell
+of the hay in the fields below. No: what we grasp or take in thus
+actively are not the sensations themselves, but the _relations_
+between these sensations, and it is of these relations, more truly than
+of the sensations themselves, that a shape is, in the most literal sense,
+_made up._ And it is this _making up of shapes,_ this grasping or
+taking in of their constituent relations, which is an active process on
+our part, and one which we can either perform or not perform. When,
+instead of merely _seeing_ a colour, we _look at_ a shape, our eye
+ceases to be merely passive to the action of the various light-waves,
+and becomes active, and active in a more or less complicated way;
+turning its differently sensitive portions to meet or avoid the
+stimulus, adjusting its focus like that of an opera glass, and like an
+opera glass, turning it to the right or left, higher or lower.
+
+Moreover, except in dealing with very small surfaces, our eye
+moves about in our head and moves our head, and sometimes our
+whole body, along with it. An analogous active process undoubtedly
+distinguishes _listening_ from mere _hearing;_ and although
+psycho-physiology seems still at a loss for the precise adjustments
+of the inner ear corresponding to the minute adjustments of the eye,
+it is generally recognised that auditive attention is accompanied by
+adjustments of the vocal parts, or preparations for such adjustments,
+which account for the impression of _following_ a sequence of
+notes as we follow the appearance of colours and light, but as we do
+_not_ follow, in the sense of _connecting by our activity,_
+consecutive sensations of taste or smell. Besides such obvious or
+presumable bodily activities requisite for looking and listening as
+distinguished from mere seeing and hearing, there is moreover in all
+perception of shape, as in all _grasping of meaning,_ a mental
+activity involving what are called _attention_ and _memory._ A
+primer of aesthetics is no place for expounding any of the various
+psychological definitions of either of these, let us call them, faculties.
+Besides I should prefer that these pages deal only with such mental
+facts as can be found in the Reader's everyday (however unnoticed)
+experience, instead of requiring for their detection the artificial
+conditions of specialised introspection or laboratory experiment. So
+I shall give to those much fought over words _attention_ and
+_memory_ merely the rough and ready meaning with which we are
+familiar in everyday language, and only beg the Reader to notice
+that, whatever psychologists may eventually prove or disprove
+_attention_ and _memory_ to be, these two, let us unscientifically
+call them _faculties,_ are what chiefly distinguishes _perception_
+from _sensation._ For instance, in grasping or taking stock of a
+visible or an audible shape we are doing something with our
+attention, or our attention is doing something in us: a travelling
+about, a returning to starting points, a summing up. And a travelling
+about not merely between what is given simultaneously in the
+present, but, even more, between what has been given in an
+immediately proximate past, and what we expect to be given in an
+immediately proximate future; both of which, the past which is put
+behind us as past, and the past which is projected forwards as future,
+necessitate the activity of _memory._ There is an adjustment of our
+feelings as well as our muscles not merely to the present sensation,
+but to the future one, and a buzz of continuing adjustment to the past.
+There is a holding over and a holding on, a reacting backwards and
+forwards of our attention, and quite a little drama of expectation,
+fulfilment and disappointment, or as psychologists call them, of
+tensions and relaxations. And this little drama involved in all
+looking or listening, particularly in all taking stock of visible or
+audible (and I may add intellectual or _verbal_) shape, has its
+appropriate accompaniment of emotional changes: the ease or
+difficulty of understanding producing feelings of victory or defeat
+which we shall deal with later. And although the various perceptive
+activities remain unnoticed in themselves (so long as easy and
+uninterrupted), we become aware of a lapse, a gap, whenever our
+mind's eye (if not our bodily one!) neglects to sweep from side to
+side of a geometrical figure, or from centre to circumference, or
+again whenever our mind's ear omits following from some particular
+note to another, just as when we fall asleep for a second during a
+lecture or sermon: we have, in common parlance, _missed the hang_
+of some detail or passage. What we have missed, in that lapse of
+attention, is a _relation,_ the length and direction of a line, or the
+span of a musical interval, or, in the case of words, the references of
+noun and verb, the co-ordination of tenses of a verb. And it is such
+relations, more or less intricate and hierarchic, which transform what
+would otherwise be meaningless juxtapositions or sequences of
+sensations into the significant entities which can be remembered and
+recognised even when their constituent sensations are completely
+altered, namely _shapes._ To our previous formula that _beautiful_
+denotes satisfaction in contemplating an aspect, we can now add that
+an _aspect_ consists of sensations grouped together into _relations_
+by our active, our remembering and foreseeing, perception.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ELEMENTS OF SHAPE
+
+LET us now examine some of these relations, not in the
+genealogical or hierarchic order assigned to them by experimental
+psychology, but in so far as they constitute the elements of _shape,_
+and more especially as they illustrate the general principle which I
+want to impress on the Reader, namely: That the perception of
+Shape depends primarily upon movements which _we_ make, and
+the measurements and comparisons which _we_ institute.
+
+And first we must examine mere _extension_ as such, which
+distinguishes our active dealings with visual and audible sensations
+from our passive reception of the sensations of taste and smell. For
+while in the case of the latter a succession of similar stimulations
+affects us as "more taste of strawberry" or "more smell of rose"
+when intermittent, or as a vague "there _is_ a strong or faint taste of
+strawberry" and a "there is a smell of lemon flower"--when
+continuous; our organ of sight being mobile, reports not "more black
+on white" but "so many inches of black line on a white ground," that
+is to say reports a certain _extension_ answering to its
+own movement. This quality of extension exists also in our
+sound-perceptions, although the explanation is less evident. Notes do not
+indeed exist (but only sounding bodies and air-vibrations) in the
+space which we call "real" because our eye and our locomotion
+coincide in their accounts of it; but notes are experienced, that is
+thought and felt, as existing in a sort of imitation space of their own.
+This "musical space," as M. Dauriac has rightly called it, has limits
+corresponding with those of our power of hearing or reproducing
+notes, and a central region corresponding with our habitual
+experience of the human voice; and in this "musical space" notes are
+experienced as moving up and down and with a centrifugal and
+centripetal direction, and also as existing at definite spans or
+_intervals_ from one another; all of which probably on account of
+presumable muscular adjustments of the inner and auditive
+apparatus, as well as obvious sensations in the vocal parts when we
+ourselves produce, and often when we merely think of, them. In
+visual perception the sweep of the glance, that is the adjustment of
+the muscles of the inner eye, the outer eye and of the head, is
+susceptible of being either interrupted or continuous like any other
+muscular process; and its continuity is what unites the mere
+successive sensations of colour and light into a unity of extension,
+so that the same successive colour-and-light-sensations can be
+experienced either as _one_ extension, or as two or more, according
+as the glance is continuous or interrupted; the eye's sweep, when not
+excessive, tending to continuity _unless a new direction requires a
+new muscular adjustment._ And, except in the case of an
+_extension_ exceeding any single movement of eye and head, a new
+adjustment answers to what we call _a change of direction.
+Extension_ therefore, as we have forestalled with regard to sound,
+has various modes, corresponding to something belonging to
+ourselves: a _middle,_ answering to the middle not of our field of
+vision, since that itself can be raised or lowered by a movement of
+the head, but to the middle of our body; and an _above_ and
+_below,_ a _right_ and a _left_ referable to our body also, or rather
+to the adjustments made by eye and head in the attempt to see our
+own extremities; for, as every primer of psychology will teach you,
+mere sight and its muscular adjustments account only for the
+dimensions of height (up and down) and of breadth (right and left)
+while the third or cubic dimension of _depth_ is a highly complex
+result of locomotion in which I include prehension. And inasmuch
+as we are dealing with _aspects_ and not with _things,_ we have as
+yet nothing to do with this _cubic_ or _third dimension,_ but are
+confining ourselves to the two dimensions of extension in height and
+breadth, which are sufficient for the existence, the identity, or more
+correctly the _quiddity,_ of visible shapes.
+
+Such a shape is therefore, primarily, a series of longer or shorter
+_extensions,_ given by a separate glance towards, or away from, our
+own centre or extremities, and at some definite angle to our own
+axis and to the ground on which we stand. But these acts of
+extension and orientation cease to be thought of as measured and
+orientated, and indeed as accomplished, by ourselves, and are
+translated into objective terms whenever our attention is turned
+outwards: thus we say that each line is of a given length and
+direction, so or so much off the horizontal or vertical.
+
+So far we have established relations only to ourselves. We now
+compare the acts of extension one against the other, and we also
+measure the adjustment requisite to pass from one to another,
+continuing to refer them all to our own axis and centre; in everyday
+speech, we perceive that the various lines are _similar_ and
+_dissimilar_ in length, direction and orientation. We _compare;_
+and comparing we _combine_ them in the unity of our intention:
+thought of together they are thought of as belonging together.
+Meanwhile the process of such comparison of the relation of each
+line with us to the analogous relation to us of its fellows, produces
+yet further acts of measurement and comparison. For in going from
+one of our lines to another we become aware of the presence
+of--how shall I express it?--well of a _nothing_ between them, what we
+call _blank space,_ because we experience a _blank_ of the
+particular sensations, say red and black, with which we are engaged
+in those lines. Between the red and black sensations of the lines we
+are looking at, there will be a possibility of other colour sensations,
+say the white of the paper, and these white sensations we shall duly
+receive, for, except by shutting our eyes, we could not avoid
+receiving them. But though received these white sensations will not
+be attended to, because they are not what we are busied with. We
+shall be _passive_ towards the white sensations while we are
+_active_ towards the black and red ones; we shall not measure the
+white; not sweep our glance along it as we do along the red and the
+black. And as _ceteris paribus_ our tense awareness of active states
+always throws into insignificance a passive state sandwiched
+between them; so, bent as we are upon our red and black extensions,
+and their comparative lengths and directions, we shall treat the
+uninteresting white extensions as a _blank,_ a gap, as that which
+separates the objects of our active interest, and takes what existence
+it has for our mind only from its relation of separating those
+interesting actively measured and compared lines. Thus the
+difference between our _active perception_ and our merely _passive
+sensation_ accounts for the fact that every visible shape is composed
+of lines (or bands) measured and compared with reference to our
+own ocular adjustments and our axis and centre; lines existing, as
+we express it, in _blank space,_ that is to say space not similarly
+measured; lines, moreover, _enclosing_ between each other more of
+this blank space, which is not measured in itself but subjected to the
+measurement of its enclosing lines. And similarly, every _audible_
+Shape consists not merely of sounds enclosing _silence,_ but of
+heard tones between which we are aware of the intervening _blank
+interval_ which _might have been_ occupied by the intermediary
+tones and semitones. In other words, visible and audible Shape is
+composed of alternations between _active,_ that is _moving,_
+measuring, referring, comparing, attention; and _passive,_ that is
+comparatively sluggish _reception_ of mere sensation.
+
+
+This fact implies another and very important one, which I have
+indeed already hinted at. If perceiving shape means comparing lines
+(they may _be bands,_ but we will call them _lines),_ and the lines
+are measured only by consecutive eye movements, then the act of
+comparison evidently includes the co-operation, however
+infinitesimally brief, of _memory._ The two halves of this
+Chippendale chair-back exist simultaneously in front of my eyes,
+but I cannot take stock simultaneously of the lengths and orientation
+of the curves to the right and the curves of the left. I must hold over
+the image of one half, and unite it, somewhere in what we call "the
+mind"--with the other; nay, I must do this even with the separate
+curves constituting the patterns each of which is measured by a
+sweep of the glance, even as I should measure them successively by
+applying a tape and then remembering and comparing their various
+lengths, although the ocular process may stand to the tape-process as
+a minute of our time to several hundreds of years. This comes to
+saying that the perception of visible shapes, even like that of audible
+ones, takes place _in time,_ and requires therefore the
+co-operation of _memory._ Now memory, paradoxical as it may sound,
+practically implies _expectation:_ the use of the past, to so speak, is
+to become that visionary thing we call the _future._ Hence, while we
+are measuring the extension and direction of one line, we are not
+only _remembering_ the extent and direction of another previously
+measured line, but we are also _expecting_ a similar, or somewhat
+similar, act of measurement of the _next_ line; even as in "following
+a melody" we not only remember the preceding tone, but _expect_
+the succeeding ones. Such interplay of present, past and future is
+requisite for every kind of _meaning,_ for every _unit of thought_;
+and among others, of the meaning, the _thought,_ which we
+contemplate under the name of _shape._ It is on account of this
+interplay of present, past and future, that Wundt counts feelings _of
+tension_ and _relaxation_ among the _elements_ of form-perception.
+And the mention of such _feelings,_ i.e. rudiments of _emotion,_
+brings us to recognise that the remembering and foreseeing of our
+acts of measurement and orientation constitutes a microscopic
+psychological drama--shall we call it the drama of the SOUL
+MOLECULES?--whose first familiar examples are those two
+peculiarities of visible and audible shape called _Symmetry_ and
+_Rythm._
+
+Both of these mean that a measurement has been made, and that the
+degree of its _span_ is kept in memory to the extent of our expecting
+that the next act of measurement will be similar. _Symmetry_
+exists quite as much in _Time_ (hence in shapes made up of
+sound-relations) as in _Space;_ and _Rythm,_ which is commonly thought
+of as an especially musical relation, exists as much in _Space_ as in
+_Time_; because the perception of shape requires Time and
+movement equally whether the relations are between objectively
+co-existent and durable marks on stone or paper, or between objectively
+successive and fleeting sound-waves. Also because, while the single
+relations of lines and of sounds require to be ascertained
+successively, the combination of those various single relations, their
+relations with one another _as whole and parts,_ require to be
+grasped by an intellectual synthesis; as much in the case of notes as
+in the case of lines. If, in either case, we did not remember the first
+measurement when we obtained the second, there would be no
+perception of shape however elementary; which is the same as
+saying that for an utterly oblivious mind there could be no
+relationships, and therefore no meaning. In the case of Symmetry
+the relations are not merely the lengths and directions of the single
+lines, that is to say their relations to ourselves, and the relation
+established by comparison between these single lines; there is now
+also the relation of both to a third, itself of course related to
+ourselves, indeed, as regards visible shape, usually answering to our
+own axis. The expectation which is liable to fulfilling or balking is
+therefore that of a repetition of this double relationship remembered
+between the lengths and directions on one side, by the lengths and
+directions on the other; and the repetition of a common relation to a
+central item.
+
+The case of RYTHM is more complex. For, although we usually
+think of Rythm as a relation of _two_ items, it is in reality a relation
+of four (or more ); because what we remember and expect is a
+mixture of similarity with dissimilarity between lengths, directions
+or impacts. OR IMPACTS. For with Rythm we come to another
+point illustrative of the fact that all shape-elements depend upon our
+own activity and its modes. A rythmical arrangement is not
+necessarily one between _objectively_ alternated elements like
+objectively longer or shorter lines of a pattern, or _objectively_
+higher or lower or longer and shorter notes. Rythm exists equally
+where the objective data, the sense stimulations, are uniform, as is
+the case with the ticks of a clock. These ticks would be registered as
+exactly similar by appropriate instruments. But our mind is not such
+an impassive instrument: our mind (whatever our mind may really
+be) is subject to an alternation of _more_ and _less,_ of _vivid_ and
+_less vivid, important_ and _less important,_ of _strong_ and
+_weak;_ and the objectively similar stimulations from outside, of
+sound or colour or light, are perceived as vivid or less vivid,
+important or less important, according to the beat of this mutual
+alternation with which they coincide: thus the uniform, ticking of the
+clock will be perceived by us as a succession in which the stress,
+that is the importance, is thrown upon the first or the second member
+of a group; and the recollection and expectation are therefore of a
+unity of dissimilar importance. We hear STRONG-WEAK; and
+remembering _strong-weak,_ we make a new _strong-weak_ out of
+that objective uniformity. Here there is no objective reason for one
+rythm more than another; and we express this by saying that the
+tickings of a clock have no intrinsic form. For _Form,_ or as I prefer
+to call it, _Shape,_ although it exists only in the mind capable of
+establishing and correlating its constituent relationships, takes an
+objective existence when the material stimulations from the outer
+world are such as to force all normally constituted minds to the same
+series and combinations of perceptive acts; a fact which explains
+why the artist can transmit the shapes existing in his own mind to
+the mind of a beholder or hearer by combining certain objective
+stimulations, say those of pigments on paper or of sound vibrations
+in time, so as to provoke perceptive activities similar to those which
+would, _ceteris paribus,_ have been provoked in himself if that
+shape had not existed first of all _only_ in his mind.
+
+A further illustration of the principle that shape-perception is a
+combination of active measurements and comparisons, and of
+remembrance and expectations, is found in a fact which has very
+great importance in all artistic dealings with shapes. I have spoken,
+for simplicity's, sake, as if the patches of colour on a blank (i.e.
+uninteresting) ground along which the glance sweeps, were
+invariably contiguous and continuous. But these colour patches, and
+the sensations they afford us, are just as often, discontinuous in the
+highest degree; and the lines constituting a shape may, as for
+instance in constellations, be entirely imaginary. The fact is that
+what we feel as a line is not an objective continuity of
+colour-or-light-patches, but the continuity of our glance's sweep which
+may either accompany this objective continuity or replace it. Indeed
+such imaginary lines thus established between isolated colour patches,
+are sometimes felt as more vividly existing than real ones, because the
+glance is not obliged to take stock of their parts, but can rush freely
+from extreme point to extreme point. Moreover not only half the
+effectiveness of design, but more than half the efficiency of practical
+life, is due to our establishing such imaginary lines. We are
+inevitably and perpetually dividing visual space (and something of
+the sort happens also with "musical space") by objectively
+non-existent lines answering to our own bodily orientation. Every course,
+every trajectory, is of this sort. And every drawing executed by an
+artist, every landscape, offered us by "Nature," is felt, because it is
+measured, with reference to a set of imaginary horizontals or
+perpendiculars. While, as I remember the late Mr G. F. Watts
+showing me, every curve which we look at is _felt as being_ part of
+an imaginary circle into which it could be prolonged. Our sum of
+measuring and comparing activities, and also our dramas of
+remembrance and expectation, are therefore multiplied by these
+imaginary lines, whether they connect, constellation-wise, a few
+isolated colour indications, or whether they are established as
+standards of reference (horizontals, verticals, etc.) for other really
+existing lines; or whether again they be thought of, like those circles,
+as _wholes_ of which objectively perceived series of colour patches
+might possibly be _parts._ In all these cases imaginary lines are
+_felt,_ as existing, inasmuch as we feel the movement by which we
+bring them into existence, and even feel that such a movement might
+be made by us when it is not.
+
+So far, however, I have dealt with these imaginary lines only as an
+additional proof that shape-perception is an establishment of two
+dimensional relationships, through our own activities, and an active
+remembering, foreseeing and combining thereof.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+FACILITY AND DIFFICULTY OF GRASPING
+
+OF this we get further proof when we proceed to another and less
+elementary relationship implied in the perception of shape: the
+relation of Whole and Parts.
+
+In dealing with the _ground_ upon which we perceive our red and
+black patches to be extended, I have already pointed out that our
+operations of measuring and comparing are not applied to all the
+patches of colour which we actually see, but only to such as we
+_look at_; an observation equally applicable to sounds. In other
+words our attention selects certain sensations, and limits to these all
+that establishing of relations, all that measuring and comparing, all
+that remembering and expecting; the other sensations being
+excluded. Now, while whatever is thus merely seen, but not looked
+at, is excluded as so much _blank_ or _otherness_; whatever is, on
+the contrary, _included_ is thereby credited with the quality of
+belonging, that is to say being included, together. And the more the
+attention alternates between the measuring of _included_ extensions
+and directions and the expectation of equivalent (symmetrical or
+rythmical) extensions or directions or stresses, the closer will
+become the relation of these items _included_ by our attention and
+the more foreign will become the _excluded otherness_ from which,
+as we feel, they _detach themselves._ But--by an amusing
+paradox--these lines measured and compared by our attention, are
+themselvesnot only _excluding_ so much _otherness or blank;_ they also
+tend, so soon as referred to one another, to _include_ some of this
+uninteresting blankness; and it is across this more or less completely
+included blankness that the eye (and the imagination!) draw such
+imaginary lines as I have pointed out with reference to the
+constellations. Thus a circle, say of red patches, _excludes_ some of
+the white paper on which it is drawn; but it _includes_ or _encloses_
+the rest. Place a red patch somewhere on that _enclosed_ blank; our
+glance and attention will now play not merely along the red
+circumference, but to and fro between the red circumference and the
+red patch, thereby establishing imaginary but thoroughly measured
+and compared lines between the two. Draw a red line from the red
+patch to the red circumference; you will begin expecting similar
+lengths on the other sides of the red patch, and you will become
+aware that these imaginary lines are, or are not, equal; in other
+words, that the red patch is, or is not, equidistant from every point of
+the red circumference. And if the red patch is not thus in the middle,
+you will expect, and imagine another patch which _is;_ and from
+this _imaginary centre_ you will draw imaginary lines, that is you
+will make by no means imaginary glance-sweeps, to the red
+circumference. Thus you may go on adding real red lines and
+imaginary lines connecting them with the circumference; and the
+more you do so the more you will feel that all these real lines and
+imaginary lines and all the blank space which the latter measure, are
+connected, or susceptible of being connected, closer and closer,
+every occasional excursion beyond the boundary only bringing you
+back with an increased feeling of this interconnexion, and an
+increased expectation of realising it in further details. But if on one
+of these glance-flickings beyond the circumference, your attention is
+caught by some colour patch or series of colour patches outside of it,
+you will either cease being interested in the circle and wander away
+to the new colour patches; or more probably, try to connect that
+outlying colour with the circle and its radii; or again failing that, you
+will "overlook it," as, in a pattern of concentric circles you overlook
+a colour band which, as you express it "has nothing to do with it,"
+that is with what you are looking at. Or again listening to. For if a
+church-bell mixes its tones and rythm with that of a symphony you
+are listening to, you may try and bring them in, make a place for
+them, _expect_ them among the other tones or rythms. Failing
+which you will, after a second or two, cease to notice those bells,
+cease to listen to them, giving all your attention once more to the
+sonorous whole whence you have expelled those intruders; or else,
+again, the intrusion will become an interruption, and the bells, once
+_listened to,_ will prevent your listening adequately to the
+symphony.
+
+Moreover, if the number of extensions, directions, real or imaginary
+lines or musical intervals, alternations of _something_ and
+_nothing,_ prove too great for your powers of measurement and
+comparison, particularly if it all surpass your habitual interplay of
+recollection and expectation, you will say (as before an over
+intricate pattern or a piece of music of unfamiliar harmonies and
+rythm) that "you can't grasp it"--that you "miss the hang of it." And
+what you will feel is that you cannot keep the parts within the whole,
+that the boundary vanishes, that what has been included unites with
+the excluded, in fact that all _shape_ welters into chaos. And as if to
+prove once more the truth of our general principle, you will have a
+hateful feeling of having been trifled with. What has been balked
+and wasted are all your various activities of measuring, comparing
+and co-ordinating; what has been trifled with are your expectations.
+And so far from contemplating with satisfaction the objective cause
+of all this vexation and disappointment, you will avoid
+contemplating it at all, and explain your avoidance by calling that
+chaotic or futile assemblage of lines or of notes "ugly."
+
+We seem thus to have got a good way in our explanation; and indeed
+the older psychology, for instance of the late Grant Allen, did not
+get any further. But to explain why a shape difficult to perceive
+should be disliked and called "ugly," by no means amounts to
+explaining why some other shape should be liked and called
+"beautiful," particularly as some ugly shapes happen to be far easier
+to grasp than some beautiful ones. The Reader will indeed remember
+that there is a special pleasure attached to all overcoming of
+difficulty, and to all understanding. But this double pleasure is
+shared with form-perception by every other successful grasping of
+meaning; and there is no reason why that pleasure should be
+repeated in the one case more than in the other; nor why we should
+repeat looking at (which is what we mean by contemplating) a shape
+once we have grasped it, any more than we continue to dwell on, to
+reiterate the mental processes by which we have worked out a
+geometrical proposition or unravelled a metaphysical crux. The
+sense of victory ends very soon after the sense of the difficulty
+overcome; the sense of illumination ends with the acquisition of a
+piece of information; and we pass on to some new obstacle and
+some new riddle. But it is different in the case of what we call
+_Beautiful. Beautiful_ means satisfactory for contemplation, _i.e._
+for reiterated perception; and the very essence of contemplative
+satisfaction is its desire for such reiteration. The older psychology
+would perhaps have explained this reiterative tendency by the
+pleasurableness of the sensory elements, the mere colours and
+sounds of which the easily perceived shape is made up. But this does
+not explain why, given that other shapes are made up of equally
+agreeable sensory elements, we should not pass on from a once
+perceived shape or combination of shapes to a new one, thus
+obtaining, in addition to the sensory agreeableness of colour or
+sound, a constantly new output of that feeling of victory and
+illumination attendant on every successful intellectual effort. Or, in
+other words, seeing that painting and music employ sensory
+elements already selected as agreeable, we ought never to wish to
+see the same picture twice, or to continue looking at it; we ought
+never to wish to repeat the same piece of music or its separate
+phrases; still less to cherish that picture or piece of music in our
+memory, going over and over again as much of its shape as had
+become our permanent possession.
+
+We return therefore to the fact that although balked perception is
+enough to make us reject a shape as _ugly, i.e._ such that we avoid
+entering into contemplation of it, easy perception is by no means
+sufficient to make us cherish a shape _as beautiful, i.e._ such that
+the reiteration of our drama of perception becomes desirable. And
+we shall have to examine whether there may not be some other
+factor of shape-perception wherewith to account for this preference
+of reiterated looking at the same to looking at something else.
+
+Meanwhile we may add to our set of formulae: difficulty in
+shape-perception makes contemplation disagreeable and impossible, and
+hence earns for aspects the adjective _ugly._ But facility in
+perception, like agreeableness of sensation by no means suffices for
+satisfied contemplation, and hence for the use of the adjective
+Beautiful.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+SUBJECT AND OBJECT
+
+BUT before proceeding to this additional factor in shape-perception,
+namely that of Empathic Interpretation, I require to forestall an
+objection which my Reader has doubtless been making throughout
+my last chapters; more particularly that in clearing away the ground
+of this objection I shall be able to lay the foundations of my further
+edifice of explanation. The objection is this: if the man on the hill
+was aware of performing any, let alone all, of the various operations
+described as constituting shape-perception, neither that man nor any
+other human being would be able to enjoy the shapes thus perceived.
+
+My answer is:
+
+When did I say or imply that he was _aware_ of doing any of it? It is
+not only possible, but extremely common, to perform processes
+without being aware of performing them. The man was not _aware,_
+for instance, of making eye adjustments and eye movements, unless
+indeed his sight was out of order. Yet his eye movements could have
+been cinematographed, and his eye adjustments have been described
+minutely in a dozen treatises. He was no more aware of _doing_ any
+measuring or comparing than we are aware of _doing_ our digestion
+or circulation, except when we do them badly. But just as we are
+aware of our digestive and circulatory processes in the sense of
+being aware of the animal spirits resulting from their adequate
+performance, so he was aware of his measuring and comparing,
+inasmuch as he was aware that the line A--B was longer than the
+line C--D, or that the point E was half an inch to the left of the point
+F. For so long as we are neither examining into ourselves, nor called
+upon to make a choice between two possible proceedings, nor forced
+to do or suffer something difficult or distressing, in fact so long as
+we are attending to whatever absorbs our attention and not to our
+processes of attending, those processes are replaced in our
+awareness by the very facts--for instance the proportions and
+relations of lines--resulting from their activity. That these results
+should not resemble their cause, that mental elements (as they are
+called) should appear and disappear, and also combine into
+unaccountable compounds (Browning's "not a third sound, but a
+star") according as we attend to them, is indeed the besetting
+difficulty of a science carried on by the very processes which it
+studies. But it is so because it is one of Psychology's basic facts.
+And, so far as we are at present concerned, this difference between
+mental processes and their results is the fact upon which
+psychological aesthetics are based. And it is not in order to convert
+the Man on the Hill to belief in his own acts of shape-perception,
+nor even to explain why he was not aware of them, that I am
+insisting upon this point. The principle I have been expounding, let
+us call it that of the _merging of the perceptive activities of the
+subject in the qualities of the object of perception,_ explains another
+and quite as important mental process which was going on in that
+unsuspecting man.
+
+But before proceeding to that I must make it clearer how that man
+stood in the matter of _awareness of himself._ He was, indeed,
+aware of himself whenever, during his contemplation of that
+landscape, the thought arose, "well, I must be going away, and
+perhaps I shan't see this place again"--or some infinitely abbreviated
+form, perhaps a mere sketched out gesture of turning away,
+accompanied by a slight feeling of _clinging,_ he couldn't for the
+life of him say in what part of his body. He was at that moment
+acutely aware that he _did not want_ to do something which it was
+optional to do. Or, if he acquiesced passively in the necessity of
+going away, aware that he _wanted to come back,_ or at all events
+wanted to carry off as much as possible of what he had seen. In short
+he was aware of himself either making the effort of tearing himself
+away, or, if some other person or mere habit, saved him this effort,
+he was aware of himself making another effort to impress that
+landscape on his memory, and aware of a future self making an
+effort to return to it. I call it _effort_; you may, if you prefer, call it
+will; at all events the man was aware of himself as nominative of a
+verb to _cling to,_ (in the future tense) _return to,_ to _choose as
+against some other alternative_; as nominative of a verb briefly, _to
+like_ or _love._ And the accusative of these verbs would be the
+landscape. But unless the man's contemplation was thus shot with
+similar ideas of some action or choice of his own, he would express
+the situation by saying "this landscape _is_ awfully beautiful."
+
+This IS. I want you to notice the formula, by which the landscape,
+ceasing to be the accusative of the man's looking and thinking,
+becomes the nominative of a verb _to be so-and-so._ That
+grammatical transformation is the sign of what I have designated, in
+philosophical language, _as the merging of the activities of the
+subject in the object._ It takes place already in the domain of simple
+sensation whenever, instead of saying "_I_ taste or _I_ smell
+something nice or nasty" we say--"_this thing_ tastes or smells nice
+or nasty." And I have now shown you how this tendency to put the
+cart before the horse increases when we pass to the more complex
+and active processes called perception; turning "I measure this
+line"--"I compare these two angles" into "this line _extends_ from A to
+B"--"these two angles _are equal_ to two right angles."
+
+But before getting to the final inversion--"this landscape _is_
+beautiful" instead of "_I_ like this landscape"--there is yet another,
+and far more curious merging of the subject's activities in the
+qualities of the object. This further putting of the cart before the
+horse (and, you will see, attributing to the cart what only the horse
+can be doing!) falls under the head of what German psychologists
+call _Einfuehlung,_ or "Infeeling"--which Prof. Titchener has
+translated _Empathy._ Now this new, and comparatively newly
+discovered element in our perception of shape is the one to which,
+leaving out of account the pleasantness of mere colour and sound
+sensations as such, we probably owe the bulk of whatever
+satisfaction we connect with the word Beautiful. And I have already
+given the Reader an example of such Empathy when I described the
+landscape seen by the man on the hill as consisting of a skyline
+"_dropping down merely to rush up again in rapid concave curves_";
+to which I might have added that there was also a plain which
+_extended,_ a valley which _wound along,_ paths which _climbed_
+and roads which _followed_ the _undulations_ of the land. But the
+best example was when I said that opposite to the man there was a
+distant mountain _rising_ against the sky.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+EMPATHY
+
+_THE mountain rises._ What do we mean when we employ this
+form of words? Some mountains, we are told, have originated in an
+_upheaval._ But even if this particular mountain did, we never saw
+it and geologists are still disputing about HOW and WHETHER. So
+the _rising_ we are talking about is evidently not that probable or
+improbable _upheaval._ On the other hand all geologists tell us that
+every mountain is undergoing a steady _lowering_ through its
+particles being weathered away and washed down; and our
+knowledge of landslips and avalanches shows us that the mountain,
+so far from rising, is _descending._ Of course we all know that,
+objects the Reader, and of course nobody imagines that the rock and
+the earth of the mountain is rising, or that the mountain is getting up
+or growing taller! All we mean is that the mountain _looks_ as if it
+were rising.
+
+The mountain _looks!_ Surely here is a case of putting the cart
+before the horse. No; we cannot explain the mountain _rising_ by
+the mountain _looking,_ for the only _looking_ in the business is
+_our_ looking _at_ the mountain. And if the Reader objects again
+that these are all _figures of speech,_ I shall answer that _Empathy_
+is what explains why we employ figures of speech at all, and
+occasionally employ them, as in the case of this rising mountain,
+when we know perfectly well that the figure we have chosen
+expresses the exact reverse of the objective truth. Very well; then,
+(says the Reader) we will avoid all figures of speech and say merely:
+when we look at the mountain _we somehow or other think of the
+action of rising._ Is that sufficiently literal and indisputable?
+
+So literal and indisputable a statement of the case, I answer, that it
+explains, when we come to examine it, why we have said that the
+mountain rises. For if the Reader remembers my chapter on
+shape-perception, he will have no difficulty in answering why we should
+have a thought of rising when we look at the mountain, since we
+cannot look at the mountain, nor at a tree, a tower or anything of
+which we similarly say that it _rises,_ without lifting our glance,
+raising our eye and probably raising our head and neck, all of which
+raising and lifting unites into a general awareness of something
+_rising._ The rising of which we are aware is going on in us. But, as
+the Reader will remember also, when we are engrossed by
+something outside ourselves, as we are engrossed in looking at the
+shape (for we can _look_ at only the shape, not the _substance)_ of
+that mountain we cease thinking about ourselves, and cease thinking
+about ourselves exactly in proportion as we are thinking of the
+mountain's shape. What becomes therefore of our awareness of
+raising or lifting or _rising?_ What can become of it (so long as it
+continues to be there!) except that it coalesces with the shape we are
+looking at; in short that the _rising_ continuing to be thought, but no
+longer to be thought of with reference to ourselves (since we aren't
+thinking of ourselves), is thought of in reference to what we _are_
+thinking about, namely the mountain, or rather the mountain's shape,
+which is, so to speak, responsible for any thought of rising, since it
+obliges us to lift, raise or rise ourselves in order to take stock of
+it. It is a case exactly analogous to our transferring the measuring done
+by our eye to the line of which we say that it _extends_ from A to B,
+when in reality the only _extending_ has been the extending of our
+glance. It is a case of what I have called the tendency to merge the
+_activities_ of the perceiving subject with the qualities of the
+perceived object. Indeed if I insisted so much upon this tendency of
+our mind, I did so largely because of its being at the bottom of the
+phenomenon of _Empathy,_ as we have just seen it exemplified in
+the _mountain which rises._
+
+If this is Empathy, says the Reader (relieved and reassured), am I to
+understand that Empathy is nothing beyond _attributing what goes
+on in us when we look at a shape to the shape itself?_
+
+I am sorry that the matter is by no means so simple! If what we
+attributed to each single shape was only the precise action which we
+happen to be accomplishing in the process of looking at it, Empathy
+would indeed be a simple business, but it would also be a
+comparatively poor one. No. The _rising_ of the mountain is an idea
+started by the awareness of our own lifting or raising of our eyes,
+head or neck, and it is an idea containing the awareness of that
+lifting or raising. But it is far more than the idea merely of that
+lifting or raising which we are doing at this particular present
+moment and in connexion with this particular mountain. That
+present and particular raising and lifting is merely the nucleus to
+which gravitates our remembrance of all similar acts of raising, or
+_rising._ which we have ever accomplished or seen accomplished,
+_raising_ or _rising_ not only of our eyes and head, but of every
+other part of our body, and of every part of every other body which
+we ever perceived to be rising. And not merely the thought of past
+_rising_ but the thought also of future rising. All these risings, done
+by ourselves or watched in others, actually experienced or merely
+imagined, have long since united together in our mind, constituting a
+sort of composite photograph whence all differences are eliminated
+and wherein all similarities are fused and intensified: the general
+idea of _rising,_ not "I rise, rose, will rise, it rises, has risen or will
+rise" but merely _rising as_ such, _rising_ as it is expressed not in
+any particular tense or person of the verb _to rise,_ but in that verb's
+infinitive. It is this universally applicable notion of rising, which is
+started in our mind by the awareness of the particular present acts of
+raising or rising involved in our looking at that mountain, and it is
+this general idea of rising, _i.e._ of _upward movement,_ which gets
+transferred to the mountain along with our own particular present
+activity of raising some part of us, and which thickens and enriches
+and marks that poor little thought of a definite raising with the
+interest, the emotional fullness gathered and stored up in its long
+manifold existence. In other words: what we are transferring (owing
+to that tendency to merge the activities of the perceiving subject
+with the qualities of the perceived object) from ourselves to the
+looked at shape of the mountain, is not merely the thought of the
+rising which is really being done by us at that moment, but the
+thought and emotion, the _idea of rising as such_ which had been
+accumulating in our mind long before we ever came into the
+presence of that particular mountain. And it is this complex mental
+process, by which we (all unsuspectingly) invest that inert mountain,
+that bodiless shape, with the stored up and averaged and essential
+modes of our activity--it is this process whereby we make the
+mountain _raise itself,_ which constitutes what, accepting Prof.
+Titchener's translation[*] of the German word _Einfuehlung,_ I have
+called Empathy.
+
+[*] From _en_ and _pascho, epathon_.
+
+The German word _Einfuehlung_ "feeling into"--derived from a
+_verb to feel oneself into something_ ("sich in Etwas ein fuehlen")
+was in current use even before Lotze and Viscber applied it to
+aesthetics, and some years before Lipps (1897) and Wundt (1903)
+adopted it into psychological terminology; and as it is now
+consecrated, and no better occurs to me, I have had to adopt it,
+although the literal connotations of the German word have
+surrounded its central meaning (as I have just defined it) with
+several mischievous misinterpretations. Against two of these I think
+it worth while to warn the Reader, especially as, while so doing, I
+can, in showing what it is not, make it even clearer what Empathy
+really is. The first of these two main misinterpretations is based
+upon the reflexive form of the German verb "_sich einfuehlen_" (to
+feel _oneself_ into) and it defines, or rather does not define,
+Empathy as a metaphysical and quasi-mythological projection of the
+ego into the object or shape under observation; a notion
+incompatible with the fact that Empathy, being only another of those
+various mergings of the activities of the perceiving subject with the
+qualities of the perceived object wherewith we have already dealt,
+depends upon a comparative or momentary abeyance of all thought
+of an ego; if we became aware that it is _we_ who are thinking the
+rising, we who are _feeling_ the rising, we should not think or feel
+that the mountain did the rising. The other (and as we shall later see)
+more justifiable misinterpretation of the word Empathy is based on
+its analogy with _sympathy,_ and turns it into a kind of sympathetic,
+or as it has been called, _inner, i.e._ merely _felt, mimicry_ of, for
+instance, the mountain's _rising._ Such mimicry, not only _inner_
+and _felt,_ but outwardly manifold, does undoubtedly often result
+from very lively _empathic_ imagination. But as it is the mimicking,
+inner or outer, of movements and actions which, like the _rising_ of
+the mountain, take place only in our imagination, it presupposes
+such previous animation of the inanimate, and cannot therefore be
+taken either as constituting or explaining Empathy itself.
+
+Such as I have defined and exemplified it in our Rising Mountain,
+Empathy is, together with mere Sensation, probably the chief factor
+of preference, that is of an alternative of satisfaction and
+dissatisfaction, in aesthetic contemplation, the muscular adjustments
+and the measuring, comparing and coordinating activities by which
+Empathy is started, being indeed occasionally difficult and
+distressing, but giving in themselves little more than a negative
+satisfaction, at the most that of difficulty overcome and suspense
+relieved. But although nowhere so fostered as in the contemplation
+of shapes, Empathy exists or tends to exist throughout our mental
+life. It is, indeed, one of our simpler, though far from absolutely
+elementary, psychological processes, entering into what is called
+imagination, sympathy, and also into that inference from our own
+inner experience which has shaped all our conceptions of an outer
+world, and given to the intermittent and heterogeneous sensations
+received from without the framework of our constant and highly
+unified inner experience, that is to say, of our own activities and
+aims. Empathy can be traced in all of modes of speech and thought,
+particularly in the universal attribution of _doing_ and _having_ and
+_tending_ where all we can really assert is successive and varied
+_being._ Science has indeed explained away the anthropomorphic
+implications of _Force_ and _Energy, Attraction_ and _Repulsion_;
+and philosophy has reduced _Cause_ and _Effect_ from implying
+intention and effort to meaning mere constant succession. But
+Empathy still helps us to many valuable analogies; and it is possible
+that without its constantly checked but constantly renewed action,
+human thought would be without logical cogency, as it certainly
+would be without poetical charm. Indeed if Empathy is so recent a
+discovery, this may be due to its being part and parcel of our
+thinking; so that we are surprised to learn its existence, as Moliere's
+good man was to hear that be talked prose.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE MOVEMENT OF LINES
+
+ANY tendency to Empathy is perpetually being checked by the need
+for practical thinking. We are made to think in the most summary
+fashion from one to another of those grouped possibilities, past,
+present and future, which we call a Thing; and in such discursive
+thinking we not only leave far behind the _aspect,_ the shape, which
+has started a given scheme of Empathy, a given _movement of
+lines,_ but we are often faced by facts which utterly contradict it.
+When, instead of looking at a particular _aspect_ of that mountain,
+we set to climbing it ourselves, the mountain ceases to "rise"; it
+becomes passive to the activity which our muscular sensations and
+our difficulty of breathing locate most unmistakably in ourselves.
+Besides which, in thus dealing with the mountain as a _thing,_ we
+are presented with a series of totally different aspects or shapes,
+some of which suggest empathic activities totally different from that
+of rising. And the mountain in question, seen from one double its
+height, will suggest the empathic activity of _spreading itself out._
+Moreover practical life hustles us into a succession of more and
+more summary perceptions; we do not actually see more than is
+necessary for the bare recognition of whatever we are dealing with
+and the adjustment of our actions not so much to what it already is,
+as to what it is likely to become. And this which is true of seeing
+with the bodily eye, is even more so of seeing, or rather _not_ seeing
+but _recognising,_ with the eye of the spirit. The practical man on
+the hill, and his scientific companion, (who is merely, so to speak, a
+man _unpractically_ concerned with practical causes and changes)
+do not thoroughly see the shapes of the landscape before them; and
+still less do they see the precise shape of the funiculars, tramways,
+offices, cheques, volcanoes, ice-caps and prehistoric inhabitants of
+their thoughts. There is not much chance of Empathy and Empathy's
+pleasures and pains in their lightning-speed, touch-and-go visions!
+
+But now let us put ourselves in the place of their aesthetically
+contemplative fellow-traveller. And, for simplicity's sake, let us
+imagine him contemplating more especially one shape in that
+landscape, the shape of that distant mountain, the one whose
+"rising"--came to an end as soon as we set to climbing it. The
+mountain is so far off that its detail is entirely lost; all we can see is
+a narrow and pointed cone, perhaps a little _toppling_ to one side, of
+uniform hyacinth blue _detaching_ itself from the clear evening sky,
+into which, from the paler misty blue of the plain, it _rises,_ a mere
+bodiless shape. It _rises._ There is at present no doubt about its
+_rising._ It rises and keeps on rising, never stopping unless _we_
+stop looking at it. It rises and never _has_ risen. Its drama of two
+lines _striving_ (one with more suddenness of energy and purpose
+than the other) to _arrive_ at a particular imaginary point in the sky,
+_arresting_ each other's _progress_ as they _meet_ in their
+_endeavour,_ this simplest empathic action of an irregular and by no
+means rectilinear triangle, goes on repeating itself, like the parabola
+of a steadily spirting fountain: for ever accomplishing itself anew
+and for ever accompanied by the same effect on the feelings of the
+beholder.
+
+It is this reiterative nature which, joined to its schematic definiteness,
+gives Empathy its extraordinary power over us. Empathy, as I have
+tried to make clear to the Reader, is due not only to the movements
+which we are actually making in the course of shape-perception, to
+present movements with their various modes of speed, intensity and
+facility and their accompanying intentions; it is due at least as much
+to our accumulated and averaged past experience of movements of
+the same kind, also with _their_ cognate various modes of speed,
+intensity, facility, and _their_ accompanying intentions. And being
+thus residual averaged, and essential, this empathic movement, this
+movement attributed to the lines of a shape, is not clogged and
+inhibited by whatever clogs and inhibits each separate concrete
+experience of the kind; still less is it overshadowed in our awareness
+by the _result_ which we foresee as goal of our real active
+proceedings. For unless they involve bodily or mental strain, our
+real and therefore transient movements do not affect us as pleasant
+or unpleasant, because our attention is always outrunning them to
+some momentary goal; and the faint awareness of them is usually
+mixed up with other items, sensations and perceptions, of wholly
+different characters. Thus, in themselves and apart from their aims,
+our bodily movements are never interesting except inasmuch as
+requiring new and difficult adjustments, or again as producing
+perceptible repercussions in our circulatory, breathing and balancing
+apparatus: a waltz, or a dive or a gallop may indeed be highly
+exciting, thanks to its resultant organic perturbations and its
+concomitants of overcome difficulty and danger, but even a dancing
+dervish's intoxicating rotations cannot afford him much of the
+specific interest of movement as movement. Yet every movement
+which we accomplish implies a change in our debit and credit of
+vital economy, a change in our balance of bodily and mental
+expenditure and replenishment; and this, if brought to our awareness,
+is not only interesting, but interesting in the sense either of pleasure
+or displeasure, since it implies the more or less furtherance or
+hindrance of our life-processes. Now it is this complete awareness,
+this brimfull interest in our own dynamic changes, in our various
+and variously combined facts of movement inasmuch as _energy_
+and _intention,_ it is this sense of the _values of movement_ which
+Empathy, by its schematic simplicity and its reiteration, is able to
+reinstate. The contemplation, that is to say the _isolating and
+reiterating perception,_ of shapes and in so far of the qualities and
+relations of movement which Empathy invests them with, therefore
+shields our dynamic sense from all competing interests, clears it
+from all varying and irrelevant concomitants, gives it, as Faust
+would have done to the instant of happiness, a sufficient duration;
+and reinstating it in the centre of our consciousness, allows it to add
+the utmost it can to our satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
+
+Hence the mysterious importance, the attraction or repulsion,
+possessed by shapes, audible as well as visible, according to their
+empathic character; movement and energy, all that we feel as being
+life, is furnished by them in its essence and allowed to fill our
+consciousness. This fact explains also another phenomenon, which
+in its turn greatly adds to the power of that very Empathy of which it
+is a result. I am speaking once more of that phenomenon called
+_Inner Mimicry_ which certain observers, themselves highly subject
+to it, have indeed considered as Empathy's explanation, rather than
+its result. In the light of all I have said about the latter, it becomes
+intelligible that when empathic imagination (itself varying from
+individual to individual) happens to be united to a high degree of
+(also individually very varying) muscular responsiveness, there may
+be set up reactions, actual or incipient, _e.g._ alterations of bodily
+attitude or muscular tension which (unless indeed they withdraw
+attention from the contemplated object to our own body) will
+necessarily add to the sum of activity empathically attributed to the
+contemplated object. There are moreover individuals in whom such
+"mimetic" accompaniment consists (as is so frequently the case in
+listening to music) in changes of the bodily balance, the breathing
+and heart-beats, in which cases additional doses of satisfaction or
+dissatisfaction result from the participation of bodily functions
+themselves so provocative of comfort or discomfort. Now it is
+obvious that such mimetic accompaniments, and every other
+associative repercussion into the seat of what our fathers correctly
+called "animal spirits," would be impossible unless reiteration, the
+reiteration of repeated acts of attention, had allowed the various
+empathic significance, the various _dynamic values,_ of given
+shapes to sink so deeply into us, to become so habitual, that even a
+rapid glance (as when we perceive the upspringing lines of a
+mountain from the window of an express train) may suffice to evoke
+their familiar dynamic associations. Thus contemplation explains, so
+to speak, why contemplation may be so brief as to seem no
+contemplation at all: past repetition has made present repetition
+unnecessary, and the empathic, the dynamic scheme of any
+particular shape may go on working long after the eye is fixed on
+something else, or be started by what is scarcely a perception at all;
+we feel joy at the mere foot-fall of some beloved person, but we do
+so because he is already beloved. Thus does the reiterative character
+essential to Empathy explain how our contemplative satisfaction in
+shapes, our pleasure in the variously combined _movements of
+lines,_ irradiates even the most practical, the apparently least
+contemplative, moments and occupations of our existence.
+
+But this is not all. This reiterative character of Empathy, this fact
+that the mountain is always rising without ever beginning to sink or
+adding a single cubit to its stature, joined to the abstract (the
+_infinitive of the verb)_ nature of the suggested activity, together
+account for art's high impersonality and its existing, in a manner,
+_sub specie aeternitatis._ The drama of lines and curves presented
+by the humblest design on bowl or mat partakes indeed of the
+strange immortality of the youths and maidens on the _Grecian
+Urn,_ to whom Keats, as you remember, says:--
+
+"Fond lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
+Though winning near the goal. Yet, do not grieve;
+She cannot fade; though thou hast not thy bliss,
+For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair."
+
+And thus, in considering the process of Aesthetic Empathy, we find
+ourselves suddenly back at our original formula: Beautiful means
+satisfactory in contemplation, and contemplation not of Things but
+of Shapes which are only Aspects of them.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE CHARACTER OF SHAPES
+
+IN my example of the Rising Mountain, I have been speaking as if
+Empathy invested the shapes we look at with only one mode of
+activity at a time. This, which I have assumed for the simplicity of
+exposition, is undoubtedly true in the case either of extremely
+simple shapes requiring _few_ and homogeneous perceptive
+activities. It is true also in the case of shapes of which familiarity (as
+explained on p. 76) has made the actual perception very summary;
+for instance when, walking quickly among trees, we notice only
+what I may call their dominant empathic gesture of _thrusting_ or
+_drooping_ their branches, because habit allows us to pick out the
+most characteristic outlines. But, except in these and similar cases,
+the _movement_ with which Empathy invests shapes is a great
+deal more complex, indeed we should speak more correctly of
+movements than of movement of lines. Thus the mountain rises, and
+does nothing but rise so long as we are taking stock only of the
+relation of its top with the plain, referring its lines solely to real or
+imaginary horizontals. But if, instead of our glance making a single
+swish upwards, we look at the two sides of the mountain
+successively and compare each with the other as well as with the
+plain, our impression (and our verbal description) will be that _one
+slope goes up while the other goes down._ When the empathic
+scheme of the mountain thus ceases to be mere _rising_ and
+becomes _rising plus descending,_ the two _movements_ with
+which we have thus invested that shape will be felt as being
+interdependent; one side _goes down_ because the other has _gone
+up,_ or the movement rises _in order to_ descend. And if we look at
+a mountain chain we get a still more complex and co-ordinated
+empathic scheme, the peaks and valleys (as in my description of
+what the Man saw from his Hillside) appearing to us as a sequence
+of risings and sinkings with correlated intensities; a slope _springing
+up_ in proportion as the previously seen one _rushed down_; the
+movements of the eye, slight and sketchy in themselves, awakening
+the composite dynamic memory of all our experience of the impetus
+gained by switch-back descent. Moreover this sequence, being a
+sequence, will awaken expectation of repetition, hence sense of
+rythm; the long chain of peaks will seem to perform a dance, they
+will furl and unfurl like waves. Thus as soon as we get a
+combination of empathic _forces_ (for that is how they affect us)
+these will henceforth be in definite relation to one another. But the
+relation need not be that of mere give and take and rythmical
+cooperation. Lines meeting one another may conflict, check, deflect
+one another; or again resist each other's effort as the steady
+determination of a circumference resists, opposes a "Quos ego!" to
+the rushing impact of the spokes of a wheel-pattern. And, along with
+the empathic suggestion of the mechanical forces experienced in
+ourselves, will come the empathic suggestion of spiritual
+characteristics: the lines will have aims, intentions, desires, moods;
+their various little dramas of endeavour, victory, defeat or
+peacemaking, will, according to their dominant empathic suggestion,
+be lighthearted or languid, serious or futile, gentle or brutal;
+inexorable, forgiving, hopeful, despairing, plaintive or proud, vulgar
+or dignified; in fact patterns of visible lines will possess all the chief
+dynamic modes which determine the expressiveness of music. But
+on the other hand there will remain innumerable emphatic
+combinations whose poignant significance escapes verbal
+classification because, as must be clearly understood, Empathy deals
+not directly with mood and emotion, but with dynamic conditions
+which enter into moods and emotions and take their names from
+them. Be this as it may, and definable or not in terms of human
+feeling, these various and variously combined (into coordinate
+scenes and acts) dramas enacted by lines and curves and angles, take
+place not in the marble or pigment embodying those contemplated
+shapes, but solely in ourselves, in what we call our memory,
+imagination and feeling. Ours are the energy, the effort, the victory
+or the peace and cooperation; and all the manifold modes of
+swiftness or gravity, arduousness or ease, with which their every
+minutest dynamic detail is fraught. And since we are their only real
+actors, these empathic dramas of lines are bound to affect us, either
+as corroborating or as thwarting our vital needs and habits; either as
+making our felt life easier or more difficult, that is to say as bringing
+us peace and joy, or depression and exasperation.
+
+Quite apart therefore from the convenience or not of the adjustments
+requisite for their ocular measurement, and apart even from the
+facility or difficulty of comparing and coordinating these
+measurements, certain shapes and elements of shape are made
+welcome to us, and other ones made unwelcome, by the sole
+working of Empathy, which identifies the modes of being and
+moving of lines with our own. For this reason meetings of lines
+which affect us as neither victory nor honourable submission nor
+willing cooperation are felt to be ineffectual and foolish. Lines also
+(like those of insufficiently tapered Doric columns) which do not
+_rise with enough impetus_ because they do not seem _to start with
+sufficient pressure at the base;_ oblique lines (as in certain imitation
+Gothic) which _lose their balance_ for lack of a countervailing
+_thrust_ against them, all these, and alas many hundreds of other
+possible combinations, are detestable to our feelings. And similarly
+we are fussed and bored by the tentative lines, the uncoordinated
+directions and impacts, of inferior, even if technically expert and
+realistically learned draughtsmen, of artists whose work may charm
+at first glance by some vivid likeness or poetic suggestion, but
+reveal with every additional day their complete insignificance as
+movement, their utter empathic nullity. Indeed, if we analyse the
+censure ostensibly based upon engineering considerations of
+material instability, or on wrong perspective or anatomical "out of
+drawing" we shall find that much of this hostile criticism is really
+that of empathic un-satisfactoriness, which escapes verbal detection
+but is revealed by the finger _following,_ as we say (and that is
+itself an instance of empathy) the movement, the development of,
+boring or fussing lines.
+
+Empathy explains not only the universally existing preferences with
+regard to shape, but also those particular degrees of liking which are
+matters of personal temperament and even of momentary mood
+(_cf_. p. 131). Thus Mantegna, with his preponderance of
+horizontals and verticals will appeal to one beholder as grave and
+reassuring, but repel another beholder (or the same in a different
+mood) as dull and lifeless; while the unstable equilibrium and
+syncopated rythm of Botticelli may either fascinate or repel as
+morbidly excited. And Leonardo's systems of whirling interlaced
+circles will merely baffle (the "enigmatic" quality we hear so much
+of) the perfunctory beholder, while rewarding more adequate
+empathic imagination by allowing us to live, for a while, in the
+modes of the intensest and most purposeful and most harmonious
+energy.
+
+Intensity and purposefulness and harmony. These are what everyday
+life affords but rarely to our longings. And this is what, thanks to
+this strange process of Empathy, a few inches of painted canvas, will
+sometimes allow us to realise completely and uninterruptedly. And
+it is no poetical metaphor or metaphysical figment, but mere
+psychological fact, to say that if the interlacing circles and pentacles
+of a Byzantine floor-pattern absorb us in satisfied contemplation,
+this is because the modes of being which we are obliged to invest
+them with are such as we vainly seek, or experience only to lose, in
+our scattered or hustled existence.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+FROM THE SHAPE TO THE THING
+
+SUCH are the satisfactions and dissatisfactions, impersonal and
+unpractical, we can receive, or in reality, give ourselves, in the
+contemplation of shape.
+
+But life has little leisure for contemplation; it demands
+_recognition,_ inference and readiness for active adaptation. Or
+rather life forces us to deal with shapes mainly inasmuch as they
+indicate the actual or possible existence of other groups of qualities
+which may help or hurt us. Life hurries us into recognising
+_Things._
+
+Now the first peculiarity distinguishing _things_ from _shapes_ is
+_that they can occupy more or less cubic space:_ we can hit up
+against them, displace them or be displaced by them, and in such
+process of displacing or resisting displacement, we become aware of
+two other peculiarities distinguishing things from shapes: they have
+_weight_ in varying degrees and _texture_ of various sorts.
+Otherwise expressed, things have _body,_ they exist in three
+dimensional space; while _shapes_ although they are often aspects
+of things (say statues or vases) having body and cubic existence,
+shapes _as_ shapes are two dimensional and bodiless.
+
+So many of the critical applications of aesthetic, as well as of the
+historical problems of art-evolution are connected with this fact or
+rather the continued misunderstanding of it, that it is well to remind
+the Reader of what general Psychology can teach us of the
+perception of the Third Dimension. A very slight knowledge of
+cubic existence, in the sense of _relief,_ is undoubtedly furnished as
+the stereoscope furnishes it, by the inevitable slight divergence
+between the two eyes; an even more infinitesimal dose of such
+knowledge is claimed for the surfaces of each eye separately. But
+whatever notions of three-dimensional space might have been
+developed from such rudiments, the perception of cubic existence
+which we actually possess and employ, is undeniably based upon the
+incomparably more important data afforded by locomotion, under
+which term I include even the tiny pressure of a finger against a
+surface, and the exploration of a hollow tooth by the tip of the
+tongue. The muscular adjustments made in such locomotion become
+associated by repetition with the two-dimensional arrangements of
+colour and light revealed by the eye, the two-dimensional being thus
+turned into the three-dimensional in our everyday experience. But
+the mistakes we occasionally make, for instance taking a road seen
+from above for a church-tower projecting out of the plain, or the
+perspective of a mountain range for its cubic shape, occasionally
+reveal that we do not really _see_ three-dimensional objects, but
+merely _infer_ them by connecting visual data with the result of
+locomotor experience. The truth of this commonplace of psychology
+can be tested by the experiment of making now one, now the other,
+colour of a floor pattern seem convex or concave according as we
+think of it as a light flower on a dark ground, or as a white cavity
+banked in by a dark ridge. And when the philistine (who may be you
+or me!) exclaims against the "out of drawing" and false perspective
+of unfamiliar styles of painting, he is, nine times out of ten, merely
+expressing his inability to identify two-dimensional shapes as
+"representing" three-dimensional things; so far proving that we do
+not decipher the cubic relations of a picture until we have guessed
+what that picture is supposed to stand for. And this is my reason for
+saying that visible shapes, though they may be aspects of cubic
+objects, have no body; and that the thought of their volume, their
+weight and their texture, is due to an interruption of our
+contemplation of shape by an excursion among the recollections of
+qualities which shapes, _as_ shapes, cannot possess.
+
+And here I would forestall the Reader's objection that the feeling of
+effort and resistance, essential to all our empathic dealings with
+two-dimensional shapes, must, after all, be due to _weight,_ which we
+have just described as a quality shapes cannot possess. My answer is
+that Empathy has extracted and schematised effort and resistance by
+the elimination of the thought of weight, as by the elimination of the
+awareness of our bodily tensions; and that it is just this elimination
+of all incompatible qualities which allows us to attribute activities to
+those two-dimensional shapes, and to feel these activities, with a
+vividness undiminished by the thought of any other circumstances.
+
+With cubic existence (and its correlative three-dimensional
+space), with weight and texture we have therefore got from the
+contemplated shape to a thought alien to that shape and its
+contemplation. The thought, to which life and its needs and dangers
+has given precedence over every other: What _Thing_ is behind this
+shape, what qualities must be inferred from this _aspect?_ After the
+possibility of occupying so much space, the most important quality
+which things can have for our hopes and fears, is _the possibility of
+altering their occupation of space;_ not our locomotion, but _theirs._
+I call it _locomotion_ rather than _movement,_ because we have
+_direct_ experience only of our own movements, and _infer_ similar
+movement in other beings and objects because of their change of
+place either across our motionless eye or across some other object
+whose relation to our motionless eye remains unchanged. I call it
+_locomotion_ also to accentuate its difference from the _movement_
+attributed to the shape of the Rising Mountain, movement _felt_ by
+us to be going on but not expected to result in any change of the
+mountain's space relations, which are precisely what would be
+altered by the mountain's _locomotion._
+
+The _practical_ question about a shape is therefore: Does it warrant
+the inference of a _thing_ able to change its position in
+three-dimensional space? to advance or recede from us? And if so in
+what manner? Will it, like a loose stone, fall upon us? like flame, rise
+towards us? like water, spread over us? Or will it change its place
+only if _we_ supply the necessary _locomotion?_ Briefly: is the
+thing of which we see the shape inert or active? And if this shape
+belongs to a thing possessing activity of its own, is its locomotion of
+that slow regular kind we call the growth and spreading of plants?
+Or of the sudden, wilful kind we know in animals and men? What
+does this shape tell us of such more formidable locomotion? Are
+these details of curve and colour to be interpreted into jointed limbs,
+can the _thing_ fling out laterally, run after us, can it catch and
+swallow us? Or is it such that _we_ can do thus by it? Does this
+shape suggest the thing's possession of desires and purposes which
+we can deal with? And if so, _why is it where it is?_ Whence does it
+come? What is it going to do? What is it _thinking_ of (if it can
+think)? How will it _feel_ towards us (if it can feel)? What would it
+say (if it could speak)? What will be its future and what may have
+been its past? To sum all up: What does the presence of this shape
+lead us to think and do and feel?
+
+Such are a few of the thoughts started by that shape and the
+possibility of its belonging to a thing. And even when, as we shall
+sometimes find, they continually return back to the shape and play
+round and round it in centrifugal and centripetal alternations, yet all
+these thoughts are excursions, however brief, from the world of
+definite unchanging shapes into that of various and ever varying
+things; interruptions, even if (as we shall later see) intensifying
+interruptions, of that concentrated and coordinated contemplation of
+shapes, with which we have hitherto dealt. And these excursions,
+and a great many more, from the world of shapes into that of things,
+are what we shall deal with, when we come to Art, under the
+heading of _representation_ and _suggestion,_ or, as is usually said,
+of _subject_ and _expression_ as opposed to _form._
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FROM THE THING TO THE SHAPE
+
+THE necessities of analysis and exposition have led us from the
+Shape to the Thing, from aesthetic contemplation to discursive and
+practical thinking. But, as the foregoing chapter itself suggests, the
+real order of precedence, both for the individual and the race, is
+inevitably the reverse, since without a primary and dominant interest
+in things no creatures would have survived to develop an interest in
+shapes.
+
+Indeed, considering the imperative need for an ever abbreviated and
+often automatic system of human reactions to sense data, it is by no
+means easy to understand (and the problem has therefore been
+utterly neglected) how mankind ever came to evolve any process as
+lengthy and complicated as that form-contemplation upon which all
+aesthetic preference depends. I will hazard the suggestion that
+familiarity with shapes took its original evolutional utility, as well as
+its origin, from the dangers of over rapid and uncritical inference
+concerning the qualities of things and man's proper reactions
+towards them. It was necessary, no doubt, that the roughest
+suggestion of a bear's growl and a bear's outline should send our
+earliest ancestors into their sheltering caves. But the occasional
+discovery that the bear was not a bear but some more harmless
+and edible animal must have brought about a comparison, a
+discrimination between the visible aspects of the two beasts, and a
+mental storage of their difference in shape, gait and colour.
+Similarly the deluding resemblance between poisonous and
+nutritious fruits and roots, would result, as the resemblance between
+the nurse's finger and nipple results with the infant, in attention to
+visible details, until the acquisition of vivid mental images became
+the chief item of the savage man's education, as it still is of the
+self-education of the modern child. This evolution of interest in visible
+aspects would of course increase tenfold as soon as mankind took to
+making things whose usefulness (_i.e._ their still non-existent
+qualities) might be jeopardised by a mistake concerning their shape.
+For long after _over_ and _under, straight_ and _oblique, right_ and
+_left,_ had become habitual perceptions in dealing with food and
+fuel, the effective aim of a stone, the satisfactory flight of an arrow,
+would be discovered to depend upon more or less of what we call
+horizontals and perpendiculars, curves and angles; and the stability
+of a fibrous tissue upon the intervals of crossing and recrossing, the
+rythmical or symmetrical arrangements revealed by the hand or eye.
+In short, _making,_ being inevitably _shaping,_ would have
+developed a more and more accurate perception and recollection of
+every detail of shape. And not only would there arise a comparison
+between one shape and another shape, but between the shape
+actually under one's eyes and the shape no longer present, between
+the shape as it really was and the shape as it ought to be. Thus in the
+very course of practical making of things there would come to be
+little interludes, recognised as useful, first of more and more
+careful looking and comparing, and then of real contemplation:
+contemplation of the arrow-head you were chipping, of the mat
+you were weaving, of the pot you were rubbing into shape;
+contemplation also of the _other_ arrow-head or mat or pot existing
+only in your wishes; of the shape you were trying to obtain with a
+premonitory emotion of the effect which its peculiarities would
+produce when once made visible to your eye! For the man cutting
+the arrow-head, the woman plaiting the mat, becoming familiar with
+the appropriate shapes of each and thinking of the various individual
+arrow-heads or mats of the same type, _would become aware of the
+different effect which such shapes had on the person who looked at
+them._ Some of these shapes would be so dull, increasing the
+tediousness of chipping and filing or of laying strand over strand;
+others so alert, entertaining and likeable, as if they were helping in
+the work; others, although equally compatible with utility, fussing or
+distressing one, never doing what one expected their lines and
+curves to do. To these suppositions I would add a few more
+suggestions regarding the evolution of shape-contemplation out of
+man's perfunctory and semi-automatic seeing of "Things." The
+handicraftsman, armourer, weaver, or potter, benefits by his own
+and his forerunners' practical experience of which shape is the more
+adapted for use and wear, and which way to set about producing it;
+his technical skill becomes half automatic, so that his eye and mind,
+acting as mere overseers to his muscles, have plenty of time for
+contemplation so long as everything goes right and no new moves
+have to be made. And once the handicraftsman contemplates the
+shape as it issues from his fingers, his mind will be gripped by that
+liking or disliking expressed by the words "beautiful" and "ugly."
+Neither is this all. The owner of a weapon or a vessel or piece of
+tissue, is not always intent upon employing it; in proportion to its
+usefulness and durability and to the amount of time, good luck, skill
+or strength required to make or to obtain it, this chattel will turn
+from a slave into a comrade. It is furbished or mended, displayed to
+others, boasted over, perhaps sung over as Alan Breck sang over his
+sword. The owner's eye (and not less that of the man envious of the
+owner!) caresses its shape; and its shape, all its well-known
+ins-and-outs and ups-and-downs, haunts the memory, ready to start into
+vividness whenever similar objects come under comparison. Now
+what holds good of primaeval and savage man holds good also of
+civilized, perhaps even of ourselves among our machine made and
+easily replaced properties. The shape of the things we make and use
+offers itself for contemplation in those interludes of inattention
+which are half of the rythm of all healthful work. And it is this
+normal rythm of attention swinging from effort to ease, which
+explains how art has come to be a part of life, how mere aspects
+have acquired for our feelings an importance rivalling that of things.
+
+I therefore commend to the Reader the now somewhat unfashionable
+hypothesis of Semper and his school, according to which the first
+preference for beauty of shape must be sought for in those arts
+like stone and metal work, pottery and weaving, which give
+opportunities for repetition, reduplication, hence rythm and
+symmetry, and whose material and technique produce what are
+called geometric patterns, meaning such as exist in two dimensions
+and do not imitate the shapes of real objects. This theory has been
+discredited by the discovery that very primitive and savage mankind
+possessed a kind of art of totally different nature, and which analogy
+with that of children suggests as earlier than that of pattern: the art
+which the ingenious hypothesis of Mr Henry Balfour derives from
+recognition of accidental resemblances between the shapes and
+stains of wood or stone and such creatures and objects as happen to
+be uppermost in the mind of the observer, who cuts or paints
+whatever may be needed to complete the likeness and enable others
+to perceive the suggestion. Whether or not this was its origin, there
+seems to have existed in earliest times such an art of a strictly
+representative kind, serving (like the spontaneous art of children) to
+evoke the idea of whatever was interesting to the craftsman and his
+clients, and doubtless practically to have some desirable magic
+effect upon the realities of things. But (to return to the hypothesis of
+the aesthetic primacy of geometric and non-representative art) it is
+certain that although such early representations occasionally attain
+marvellous life-likeness and anatomical correctness, yet they do not
+at first show any corresponding care for symmetrical and rythmical
+arrangement. The bisons and wild boars, for instance, of the
+Altamira cave frescoes, do indeed display vigour and beauty in the
+lines constituting them, proving that successful dealing with shape,
+even if appealing only to practical interest, inevitably calls forth the
+empathic imagination of the more gifted artists; but these
+marvellously drawn figures are all huddled together or scattered as
+out of a rag-bag; and, what is still more significant, they lack that
+insistence on the feet which not only suggests ground beneath them
+but, in so doing, furnishes a horizontal by which to start, measure
+and take the bearings of all other lines. These astonishing
+palaeolithic artists (and indeed the very earliest Egyptian and Greek
+ones) seem to have thought only of the living models and their
+present and future movements, and to have cared as little for lines
+and angles as the modern children whose drawings have been
+instructively compared with theirs by Levinstein and others. I
+therefore venture to suggest that such aesthetically essential
+attention to direction and composition must have been applied to
+representative art when its realistic figures were gradually
+incorporated into the patterns of the weaver and the potter. Such
+"stylisation" is still described by art historians as a "degeneration"
+due to unintelligent repetition; but it was on the contrary the
+integrating process by which the representative element was
+subjected to such aesthetic preferences as had been established in
+the manufacture of objects whose usefulness or whose production
+involved accurate measurement and equilibrium as in the case of
+pottery or weapons, or rythmical reduplication as in that of textiles.
+
+Be this question as it may (and the increasing study of the origin and
+evolution of human faculties will some day settle it!) we already
+know enough to affirm that while in the very earliest art the
+shape-element and the element of representation are usually separate, the
+two get gradually combined as civilisation advances, and the shapes
+originally interesting only inasmuch as suggestions (hence as
+magical equivalents) or things, and employed for religious,
+recording, or self-expressive purposes, become subjected to
+selection and rearrangement by the habit of avoiding disagreeable
+perceptive and empathic activities and the desire of giving scope to
+agreeable ones. Nay the whole subsequent history of painting and
+sculpture could be formulated as the perpetual starting up of new
+representative interests, new interests in _things,_ their spatial
+existence, locomotion, anatomy, their reaction to light, and also their
+psychological and dramatic possibilities; and the subordination of
+these ever-changing interests in things to the unchanging habit of
+arranging visible shapes so as to diminish opportunities for the
+contemplative dissatisfaction and increase opportunities for the
+contemplative satisfaction to which we attach the respective names
+of "ugly" and "beautiful."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE AIMS OF ART
+
+WE have thus at last got to Art, which the Reader may have
+expected to be dealt with at the outset of a primer on the Beautiful.
+
+Why this could not be the case, will be more and more apparent in
+my remaining chapters. And, in order to make those coming
+chapters easier to grasp, I may as well forestall and tabulate the
+views they embody upon the relation between the Beautiful and Art.
+These generalisations are as follows:
+
+Although it is historically probable that the habit of avoiding
+ugliness and seeking beauty of shape may have been originally
+established by utilitarian attention to the non-imitative
+("geometrical") shapes of weaving, pottery and implement-making,
+and transferred from these crafts to the shapes intended to represent
+or imitate natural objects, yet the distinction between _Beautiful_
+and _Ugly_ does not belong either solely or necessarily to what we
+call _Art._ Therefore the satisfaction of the shape-perceptive or
+aesthetic preferences must not be confused with any of the many and
+various other aims and activities to which art is due and by which it
+is carried on. Conversely: although in its more developed phases,
+and after the attainment of technical facility, art has been
+differentiated from other human employment by its foreseeing the
+possibility of shape-contemplation and therefore submitting itself to
+what I have elsewhere called the _aesthetic imperative,_ yet art has
+invariably started from some desire other than that of affording
+satisfactory shape-contemplation, with the one exception of cases
+where it has been used to keep or reproduce opportunities of such
+shape contemplation already accidentally afforded by natural shapes,
+say, those of flowers or animals or landscapes, or even occasionally
+of human beings, which had already been enjoyed as beautiful. All
+art therefore, except that of children, savages, ignoramuses and
+extreme innovators, invariably avoids ugly shapes and seeks for
+beautiful ones; _but art does this while pursuing all manner of
+different aims._ These non-aesthetic aims of art may be roughly
+divided into (A) the making of useful objects ranging from clothes
+to weapons and from a pitcher to a temple; (B) the registering or
+transmitting of facts and their visualising, as in portraits, historical
+pictures or literature, and book illustration; and (C) the awakening,
+intensifying or maintaining of definite emotional states, as especially
+by music and literature, but also by painting and architecture when
+employed as "aids to devotion." And these large classes may again
+be subdivided and connected, if the Reader has a mind to, into
+utilitarian, social, ritual, sentimental, scientific and other aims, some
+of them not countenanced or not avowed by contemporary morality.
+
+How the aesthetic imperative, i.e. the necessities of satisfactory
+shape-contemplation, qualifies and deflects the pursuit of such
+non-aesthetic aims of art can be shown by comparing, for instance, the
+mere audible devices for conveying conventional meaning and
+producing and keeping up emotional conditions, viz. the hootings
+and screechings of modern industrialism no less than the ritual
+noises of savages, with the arrangements of well constituted pitch,
+rythm, tonality and harmony in which military, religious or dance
+music has disguised its non-aesthetic functions of conveying signals
+or acting on the nerves. Whatever is unnecessary for either of these
+motives (or any others) for making a noise, can be put to the account
+of the desire to avoid ugliness and enjoy beauty. But the workings of
+the aesthetic imperative can best be studied in the Art of the
+visual-representative group, and especially in painting, which allows us to
+follow the interplay of the desire to be told (or tell) _facts about
+things_ with the desire to _contemplate shapes,_ and to contemplate
+them (otherwise we should _not_ contemplate!) with sensuous,
+intellectual and empathic satisfaction.
+
+This brings us back to the Third Dimension, of which the possession
+is, as have we seen, the chief difference between _Things,_ which
+can alter their aspect in the course of their own and our actions, and
+_Shapes,_ which can only be contemplated by our bodily and mental
+eye, and neither altered nor thought of as altered without more or
+less jeopardising their identity.
+
+I daresay the Reader may not have been satisfied with the reference
+to the locomotor nature of cubic perception as sufficient justification
+of my thus connecting cubic existence with Things rather than with
+Shapes, and my implying that aesthetic preference, due to the
+sensory, intellectual and empathic factors of perception, is
+applicable only to the two other dimensions. And the Reader's
+incredulity and surprise will have been all the greater, because
+recent art-criticism has sedulously inculcated that the suggestion of
+cubic existence is the chief function of pictorial genius, and the
+realisation of such cubic existence the highest delight which pictures
+can afford to their worthy beholder. This particular notion, entirely
+opposed to the facts of visual perception and visual empathy, will
+repay discussion, inasmuch as it accidentally affords an easy
+entrance into a subject which has hitherto presented inextricable
+confusion, namely the relations of _Form_ and _Subject,_ or, as I
+have accustomed the Reader to consider them, the _contemplated
+Shape_ and the _thought-of Thing._
+
+Let us therefore examine why art-criticism should lay so great a
+stress on the suggestion and the acceptance of that suggestion, of
+three-dimensional existence in paintings. _In paintings._ For this
+alleged aesthetic desideratum ceases to be a criterion of merit when
+we come to sculpture, about which critics are more and more
+persistently teaching (and with a degree of reason) that one of the
+greatest merits of the artist, and of the greatest desiderata of the
+beholder, is precisely the reduction of real cubic existence by
+avoiding all projection beyond a unified level, that is to say by
+making a solid block of stone look as if it were a representation on a
+flat surface. This contradiction explains the origin of the theory
+giving supreme pictorial importance to the Third Dimension. For art
+criticism though at length (thanks especially to the sculptor
+Hildebrand) busying itself also with plastic art, has grown up mainly
+in connexion with painting. Now in painting the greatest scientific
+problem, and technical difficulty, has been the suggestion of
+three-dimensional existences by pigments applied to a two-dimensional
+surface; and this problem has naturally been most successfully
+handled by the artists possessing most energy and imagination, and
+equally naturally shirked or bungled or treated parrot-wise by the
+artists of less energy and imagination. And, as energy and
+imagination also show themselves in finer perception, more vivid
+empathy and more complex dealings with shapes which are only
+two-dimensional, it has come about that the efficient and original
+solutions of the cubic problem have coincided, _ceteris paribus,_
+with the production of pictures whose two-dimensional qualities
+have called forth the adjective _beautiful,_ and _beautiful_ in the
+most intense and complicated manner. Hence successful treatment
+of cubic suggestion has become an habitual (and threatens to
+become a rule-of-thumb) criterion of pictorial merit; the more so
+that qualities of two-dimensional shape, being intrinsic and specific,
+are difficult to run to ground and describe; whereas the quality of
+three-dimensional suggestion is ascertainable by mere comparison
+between the shapes in the picture and the shapes afforded by real
+things when seen in the same perspective and lighting. Most people
+can judge whether an apple in a picture "looks as if" it were solid,
+round, heavy and likely to roll off a sideboard in the same picture;
+and some people may even, when the picture has no other claims on
+their interest, experience incipient muscular contractions such as
+would eventually interfere with a real apple rolling off a real
+sideboard. Apples and sideboards offer themselves to the meanest
+experience and can be dealt with adequately in everyday language,
+whereas the precise curves and angles, the precise relations of
+directions and impacts, of parts to whole, which together make up
+the identity of a two-dimensional shape, are indeed perceived and
+felt by the attentive beholder, but not habitually analysed or set forth
+in words. Moreover the creation of two-dimensional shapes
+satisfying to contemplation depends upon two very different factors:
+on traditional experience with regard to the more general
+arrangements of lines, and on individual energy and sensitiveness,
+i.e. on genius in carrying out, and ringing changes on, such
+traditional arrangements. And the possession of tradition or genius,
+although no doubt the most important advantage of an artist,
+happens not to be one to which he can apply himself as to a problem.
+On the other hand a problem to be solved is eternally being pressed
+upon every artist; pressed on him by his clients, by the fashion of his
+time and also by his own self inasmuch as he is a man interested not
+only in _shapes_ but in _things._ And thus we are back at the fact
+that the problem given to the painter to solve by means of lines and
+colours on a flat surface, is the problem of telling us something new
+or something important about _things:_ what things are made of,
+how they will react to our doings, how they move, what they feel
+and think; and above all, I repeat it, what amount of space they
+occupy with reference to the space similarly occupied, in present or
+future, by other things including ourselves.
+
+Our enquiry into the excessive importance attributed by critics to
+pictorial suggestion of cubic existence has thus led us back to the
+conclusion contained in previous chapters, namely that beauty
+depending negatively on ease of visual perception, and positively
+upon emphatic corroboration of our dynamic habits, is a quality of
+_aspects,_ independent of cubic existence and every other possible
+quality of _things_; except in so far as the thought of
+three-dimensional, and other, qualities of things may interfere with the
+freedom and readiness of mind requisite for such highly active and
+sensitive processes as those of empathic form interpretation. But the
+following chapter will, I trust, make it clear that such interference of
+the _Thought about Things_ with the _Contemplation of Shapes_ is
+essential to the rythm of our mental life, and therefore a chief factor
+in all artistic production and appreciation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+ATTENTION TO SHAPES
+
+TO explain how art in general, and any art in particular, succeeds in
+reconciling these contradictory demands, I must remind the Reader
+of what I said (p. 93) about the satisfactory or unsatisfactory
+possibilities of shapes having begun to be noticed in the moments of
+slackened attention to the processes of manufacturing the objects
+embodying those shapes, and in the intervals between practical
+employment of these more or less _shapely_ objects. And I must ask
+him to connect with these remarks a previous passage (p. 44)
+concerning the intermittent nature of normal acts of attention, and
+their alternation as constituting _on-and-off beats._ The deduction
+from these two converging statements is that, contrary to the a-priori
+theories making aesthetic contemplation an exception, a kind of
+bank holiday, to daily life, it is in reality one-half of daily life's
+natural and healthy rythm. That the real state of affairs, as revealed
+by psychological experiment and observation, should have escaped
+the notice of so many aestheticians, is probably due to their theories
+starting from artistic production rather than from aesthetic
+appreciation, without which art would after all probably never have
+come into existence.
+
+The production of the simplest work of art cannot indeed be thought
+of as one of the alternations of everyday attention, because it is a
+long, complex and repeatedly resumed process, a whole piece of life,
+including in itself hundreds and thousands of alternations of _doing_
+and _looking,_ of discursive thinking of aims and ways and means
+and of contemplation of aesthetic results. For even the humblest
+artist has to think of whatever objects or processes his work aims at
+representing, conveying or facilitating; and to think also of the
+objects, marble, wood, paints, voices, and of the processes, drawing,
+cutting, harmonic combining, by which he attempts to compass one
+of the above-mentioned results. The artist is not only an aesthetically
+appreciative person; he is, in his own way, a man of science and a
+man of practical devices, an expert, a craftsman and an engineer. To
+produce a work of art is not an interlude in his life, but his life's
+main business; and he therefore stands apart, as every busy specialist
+must, from the business of other specialists, of those ministering to
+mankind's scientific and practical interests.
+
+But while it takes days, months, sometimes years to produce a work
+of art, it may require (the process has been submitted to exact
+measurement by the stop-watch) not minutes but seconds, to take
+stock of that work of art in such manner as to carry away its every
+detail of shape, and to continue dealing with it in memory. The
+unsuspected part played by memory explains why aesthetic
+contemplation can be and normally is, an intermittent function
+alternating with practical doing and thinking. It is in memory,
+though memory dealing with what we call the present, that we
+gather up parts into wholes and turn consecutive measurements into
+simultaneous relations; and it is probably in memory that we deal
+empathically with shapes, investing their already perceived
+directions and relations with the remembered qualities of our own
+activities, aims and moods. And similarly it is thanks to memory that
+the brief and intermittent acts of aesthetic appreciation are combined
+into a network of contemplation which intermeshes with our other
+thoughts and doings, and yet remains different from them, as the
+restorative functions of life remain different from life's expenditure,
+although interwoven with them. Every Reader with any habit of
+self-observation knows how poignant an impression of beauty may be
+got, as through the window of an express train, in the intermittence
+of practical business or abstract thinking, nay even in what I have
+called the _off-beat_ of deepest personal emotion, the very stress of
+the practical, intellectual or personal instant (for the great
+happenings of life are measured in seconds!) apparently driving in
+by contrast, or conveying on its excitement, that irrelevant aesthetic
+contents of the _off-beat_ of attention. And while the practical or
+intellectual interest changes, while the personal emotion subsides,
+that aesthetic impression remains; remains or recurs, united, through
+every intermittence, by the feeling of identity, that identity which,
+like _the rising of the mountain,_ is due to the reiterative nature of
+shape-contemplation: the fragments of melody may be interrupted in
+our memory by all manner of other thoughts, but they will recur and
+coalesce, and recurring and coalescing, bring with them the
+particular mood which their rythms and intervals have awakened in
+us and awaken once more.
+
+That diagrammatic Man on the Hill in reality _thought away_ from
+the landscape quite as much as his practical and scientific
+companions; what he did, and they did not, was to think _back_ to it;
+and think back to it always with the same references of lines and
+angles, the same relations of directions and impacts, of parts and
+wholes. And perhaps the restorative, the healing quality of aesthetic
+contemplation is due, in large part, to the fact that, in the perpetual
+flux of action and thought, it represents reiteration and therefore
+stability.
+
+Be that as it may, the intermittent but recurrent character of shape
+contemplation, the fact that it is inconceivably brief and amazingly
+repetitive, that it has the essential quality of identity because of
+reiteration, all this explains also two chief points of our subject. First:
+how an aesthetic impression, intentionally or accidentally conveyed
+in the course of wholly different interests, can become a constant
+accompaniment to the shifting preoccupations of existence, like the
+remembered songs which sing themselves silently in our mind and
+the remembered landscapes becoming an intangible background to
+our ever-varying thoughts. And, secondly, it explains how art can
+fulfil the behests of our changing and discursive interest in things
+while satisfying the imperious unchanging demands of the
+contemplated preference for beautiful aspects. And thus we return to
+my starting-point in dealing with art: that art is conditioned by the
+desire for beauty while pursuing entirely different aims, and
+executing any one of a variety of wholly independent non-aesthetic
+tasks.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+INFORMATION ABOUT THINGS
+
+AMONG the facts which Painting is set to tell us about things, the
+most important, after cubic existence, is Locomotion. Indeed in the
+development of the race as well as in that of the individual, pictorial
+attention to locomotion seems to precede attention to cubic existence.
+For when the palaeolithic, or the Egyptian draughtsman, or even the
+Sixth Century Greek, unites profile legs and head with a full-face
+chest; and when the modern child supplements the insufficiently
+projecting full-face nose by a profile nose tacked on where we
+expect the ear, we are apt to think that these mistakes are due to
+indifference to the cubic nature of things. The reverse is, however,
+the case. The primitive draughtsman and the child are recording
+impressions received in the course of the locomotion either of the
+thing looked at or of the spectator. When they unite whatever
+consecutive aspects are most significant and at the same time easiest
+to copy, they are in the clutches of their cubic experience, and what
+they are indifferent about, perhaps unconscious of, is the
+_two-dimensional_ appearance which a body presents when its parts are
+seen simultaneously and therefore from a single point of view. The
+progress of painting is always from representing the Consecutive to
+representing the Simultaneous; perspective, foreshortening, and later,
+light and shade, being the scientific and technical means towards
+this end.
+
+Upon our knowledge of the precise stage of such pictorial
+development depends our correct recognition of what things, and
+particularly what spatial relations and locomotion, of things, the
+painter is intended to represent. Thus when a Byzantine
+draughtsman puts his figures in what look to us as superposed tiers,
+he is merely trying to convey their existence behind one another on
+a common level. And what we take for the elaborate contortions of
+athletes and Athenas on Sixth Century vases turns out to be nothing
+but an archaic representation of ordinary walking and running.
+
+The suggestion of locomotion depends furthermore on anatomy.
+What the figures of a painting are intended to be doing, what they
+are intended to have just done and to be going to do, in fact all
+questions about their action and business, are answered by reference
+to their bodily structure and its real or supposed possibilities. The
+same applies to expression of mood.
+
+The impassiveness of archaic Apollos is more likely to be due to
+anatomical difficulties in displacing arms and legs, than to lack of
+emotion on the part of artists who were, after all, contemporaries
+either of Sappho or Pindar. And it is more probable that the
+sculptors of Aegina were still embarrassed about the modelling of
+lips and cheeks than that, having Homer by heart, they imagined his
+heroes to die silently and with a smirk.
+
+I have entered into this question of perspective and anatomy, and
+given the above examples, because they will bring home to the
+reader one of the chief principles deduced from our previous
+examination into the psychology of our subject, namely that _all
+thinking about things is thinking away from the Shapes suggesting
+those things, since it involves knowledge which the Shapes in
+themselves do not afford._ And I have insisted particularly upon the
+dependence of representations of locomotion upon knowledge of
+three-dimensional existence, because, before proceeding to the
+relations of Subject and Form in painting, I want to impress once
+more upon the reader the distinction between the _locomotion of
+things_ (locomotion active or passive) and what, in my example of
+the _mountain which rises,_ I have called the _empathic movement
+of lines._ Such _movement of lines_ we have seen to be a scheme of
+activity suggested by our own activity in taking stock of a
+two-dimensional-shape; an _idea,_ or _feeling_ of activity which we,
+being normally unaware of its origin in ourselves, project into the
+shape which has suggested it, precisely as we project our sensation
+of _red_ from our own eye and mind into the object which has
+deflected the rays of light in such a way as to give us that _red_
+sensation. Such _empathic,_ attributed, movements of lines are
+therefore intrinsic qualities of the shapes whose active perception
+has called them forth in our imagination and feeling; and being
+qualities of the shapes, they inevitably change with every alteration
+which a shape undergoes, every shape, actively perceived, having its
+own special _movement of lines;_ and every _movement of lines,_
+or _combination of movements of lines_ existing in proportion as
+we go over and over again the particular shape of which it is a
+quality. The case is absolutely reversed when we perceive or think
+of, the _locomotion of things._ The thought of a thing's locomotion,
+whether locomotion done by itself or inflicted by something else,
+necessitates our thinking away from the particular shape before us to
+another shape more or less different. In other words locomotion
+necessarily alters what we are looking at or thinking of. If we think
+of Michel Angelo's seated Moses as getting up, we think _away_
+from the approximately pyramidal shape of the statue to the
+elongated oblong of a standing figure. If we think of the horse of
+Marcus Aurelius as taking the next step, we think of a straightened
+leg set on the ground instead of a curved leg suspended in the air.
+And if we think of the Myronian Discobolus as letting go his quoit
+and "recovering," we think of the matchless spiral composition as
+unwinding and straightening itself into a shape as different as that of
+a tree is different from that of a shell.
+
+The pictorial representation of locomotion affords therefore the
+extreme example of the difference between discursive thinking
+about things and contemplation of shape. Bearing this example in
+mind we cannot fail to understand that, just as the thought of
+_locomotion_ is opposed to the thought of _movement of lines,_ so,
+in more or less degree, the thought of the objects and actions
+represented by a picture or statue, is likely to divert the mind from
+the pictorial and plastic shapes which do the representing. And we
+can also understand that the problem unconsciously dealt with by all
+art (though by no means consciously by every artist) is to execute
+the order of suggesting interesting facts about things in a manner
+such as to satisfy at the same time the aesthetic demand for shapes
+which shall be satisfactory to contemplate. Unless this demand for
+sensorially, intellectually and empathically desirable shapes be
+complied with a work of art may be interesting as a diagram, a
+record or an illustration, but once the facts have been conveyed and
+assimilated with the rest of our knowledge, there will remain a shape
+which we shall never want to lay eyes upon. I cannot repeat too
+often that the differentiating characteristic of art is that it gives its
+works a value for contemplation independent of their value for
+fact-transmission, their value as nerve-and-emotion-excitant and of their
+value for immediate, for practical, utility. This aesthetic value,
+depending upon the unchanging processes of perception and
+empathy, asserts itself in answer to every act of contemplative
+attention, and is as enduring and intrinsic as the other values are apt
+to be momentary and relative. A Greek vase with its bottom
+knocked out and with a scarce intelligible incident of obsolete
+mythology portrayed upon it, has claims upon our feelings which the
+most useful modern mechanism ceases to have even in the intervals
+of its use, and which the newspaper, crammed full of the most
+important tidings, loses as soon as we have taken in its contents.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE CO-OPERATION OF THINGS AND SHAPES
+
+DURING the Middle Ages and up to recent times the chief task of
+painting has been, ostensibly, the telling and re-telling of the same
+Scripture stories; and, incidentally, the telling them with the addition
+of constantly new items of information about _things:_ their volume,
+position, structure, locomotion, light and shade and interactions of
+texture and atmosphere; to which items must be added others of
+psychological or (pseudo)-historical kind, how it all came about, in
+what surroundings and dresses, and accompanied by what feelings.
+This task, official and unofficial, is in no way different from those
+fulfilled by the man of science and the practical man, both of whom
+are perpetually dealing with additional items of information. But
+mark the difference in the artist's way of accomplishing this task: a
+scientific fact is embodied in the progressive mass of knowledge,
+assimilated, corrected; a practical fact is taken in consideration, built
+upon; but the treatise, the newspaper or letter, once it has conveyed
+these facts, is forgotten or discarded. The work of art on the contrary
+is remembered and cherished; or at all events it is made with the
+intention of being remembered and cherished. In other words and as
+I shall never tire of repeating, the differentiating characteristic of art
+is that it makes _you think back to the shape_ once that shape has
+conveyed its message or done its business of calling your attention
+or exciting your emotions. And the first and foremost problem, for
+instance of painting, is that of preventing the beholder's eye from
+being carried, by lines of perspective, outside the frame and even
+persistently out of the centre of the picture; the sculptor (and this is
+the real reason of the sculptor Hildebrand's rules for plastic
+composition) obeying a similar necessity of keeping the beholder's
+eye upon the main masses of his statue, instead of diverting it, by
+projections at different distances, like the sticking out arms and
+hands of Roman figures. So much for the eye of the body: the
+beholder's curiosity must similarly not be carried outside the work of
+art by, for instance, an incomplete figure (legs without a body!) or
+an unfinished gesture, this being, it seems to roe, the only real
+reason against the representation of extremely rapid action and
+transitory positions. But when the task of conveying information
+implies that the beholder's thoughts be deliberately led from what is
+represented to what is not, then this centrifugal action is dealt with
+so as to produce a centripetal one back to the work of art: the painter
+suggests questions of _how_ and _why_ which get their answers in
+some item obliging you to take fresh stock of the picture. What Is
+the meaning of the angels and evidently supernatural horseman in
+the foreground of Raphael's _Heliodorus?_ Your mind flies to the
+praying High Priest in the central recess of the temple, and in going
+backwards and forwards between him, the main group and the
+scattered astonished bystanders, you are effectually enclosed within
+the arches of that marvellous composition, and induced to explore
+every detail of its lovely and noble constituent shapes.
+
+The methods employed thus to keep the beholder's attention inside
+the work of art while suggesting things beyond it, naturally vary
+with the exact nature of the non-aesthetic task which has been set to
+the artist; and with the artist's individual endowment and even more
+with the traditional artistic formulae of his country and time:
+Raphael's devices in _Heliodorus_ could not have been compassed
+by Giotto; and, on the other hand, would have been rejected as
+"academic" by Manet. But whatever the methods employed, and
+however obviously they reveal that satisfactory form-contemplation
+is the one and invariable _condition_ as distinguished from the
+innumerable varying _aims,_ of all works of art, the Reader will find
+them discussed not as methods for securing attention to the shape,
+but as methods of employing that shape for some non-aesthetic
+purpose; whether that purpose be inducing you to drink out of a cup
+by making its shape convenient or suggestive; or inducing you to
+buy a particular commodity by branding its name and virtues on
+your mind; or fixing your thoughts on the Madonna's sorrows; or
+awaking your sympathy for Isolde's love tragedy. And yet it is
+evident that the artist who shaped the cup or designed the poster
+would be horribly disappointed if you thought only of drinking or of
+shopping and never gave another look to the cup or the poster; and
+that Perugino or Wagner would have died of despair if his
+suggestion of the Madonna's sorrows or of Isolde's love-agonies had
+been so efficacious as to prevent anybody from looking twice at the
+fresco or listening to the end of the opera. This inversion of the
+question is worth inquiring into, because, like the analogous paradox
+about the pictorial "realisation" of cubic existence, it affords an
+illustration of some of the psychological intricacies of the relation
+between Art and the Beautiful. This is how I propose to explain it.
+
+The task to which an artist is set varies from one work to another,
+while the shapes employed for the purpose are, as already said,
+limited by his powers and especially by the precise moment in
+artistic evolution. The artist therefore thinks of his available shapes
+as something given, as _means,_ and the subject he is ordered to
+represent (or the emotion he is commissioned to elicit) as the
+all-important _aim._ Thus he thinks of himself (and makes the critic
+think of him) not as preventing the represented subject or expressed
+emotion from withdrawing the beholder from the artistic shapes, but,
+on the contrary, as employing these artistic shapes for the sole
+purpose of that representation or emotional expression. And this
+most explicable inversion of the real state of affairs ends by making
+the beholder believe that what _he_ cares for in a masterpiece is not
+the beauty of shape which only a masterpiece could have, but the
+efficacy of bringing home a subject or expressing an emotion which
+could be just as efficaciously represented or elicited by the vilest
+daub or the wretchedest barrel organ! This inevitable, and I believe,
+salutary illusion of the artist, is further in creased by the fact that
+while the artist's ingenuity must be bent on avoiding irrelevance and
+diminishing opportunities for ugliness, the actual beauty of the
+shapes he is creating arises from the depths of his unreasoned,
+traditional and organised consciousness, from activities which might
+be called automatic if they were not accompanied by a critical
+feeling that what is produced thus spontaneously and inevitably is
+either turning out as it must and should, or, contrariwise, insists
+upon turning out exactly as it _should not._ The particular system of
+curves and angles, of directions and impacts of lines, the particular
+"whole-and-part" scheme of, let us say, Michelangelo, is due to his
+modes of aesthetic perceiving, feeling, living, added to those of all
+the other artists whose peculiarities have been averaged in what we
+call the school whence Michelangelo issued. He can no more depart
+from these shapes than he can paint Rembrandt's Pilgrims of
+Emmaus without Rembrandt's science of light and shade and
+Rembrandt's oil-and-canvas technique. There is no alternative, hence
+no choice, hence no feeling of a problem to resolve, in this question
+of shapes to employ. But there are dozens of alternatives and of acts
+of choice, there is a whole series of problems when Michelangelo
+sets to employing these inevitable shapes to telling the Parting of the
+Light from the Darkness, or the Creation of Adam on the Vault of
+the Sixtine, and to surrounding the stories from Genesis with
+Prophets and Sibyls and Ancestors of Christ. Is the ceiling to remain
+a unity, or be broken up into irrelevant compositions? Here comes in,
+alongside of his almost automatic genius for shapes, the man's
+superhuman constructive ingenuity. See how he divides that ceiling
+in such a way that the frames of the separate compositions combine
+into a huge structure of painted rafters and brackets, nay the
+Prophets and Sibyls, the Ancestors and Ancestresses themselves,
+and the naked antique genii, turn into architectural members,
+holding that imaginary roof together, securing its seeming stability,
+increasing, by their gesture its upspring and its weightiness, and at
+the same time determining the tracks along which the eye is forced
+to travel. Backwards and forwards the eye is driven by that living
+architecture, round and round in its search now for completion of
+visible pattern, now for symbolic and narrative meaning. And ever
+back to the tale of the Creation, so that the remote historic incidents
+of the Ancestors, the tremendous and tremendously present lyric
+excitement and despair of the prophetic men and women, the pagan
+suggestion of the athletic genii, all unite like the simultaneous and
+consecutive harmonies of a titanic symphony, round the recurrent
+and dominant phrases of those central stories of how the universe
+and man were made, so that the beholder has the emotion of hearing
+not one part of the Old Testament, but the whole of it. But
+meanwhile, and similarly interchanging and multiplying their
+imaginative and emotional appeal, the thought of those most
+memorable of all written stories unites with the perception and
+empathy of those marvellous systems of living lines and curves and
+angles, throbbing with their immortal impacts and speeds and
+directions in a great coordinated movement that always begins and
+never ends, until it seems to the beholder as if those painted shapes
+were themselves the crowning work of some eighth day of Creation,
+gathering up in reposeful visible synthesis the whole of Creation's
+ineffable energy and harmony and splendour.
+
+This example of Michelangelo's ceiling shows how, thanks to the
+rythmical nature of perception, art fulfils the mission of making us
+think from Shapes to Things and from Things back to Shapes. And it
+allows us to see the workings of that psychological law, already
+manifest in the elementary relations of line to line and dot to dot, by
+which whatever can be thought and felt in continuous alternation
+tends to be turned into a whole by such reiteration of common
+activities. And this means that Art adds to its processes of selection
+and exclusion a process of _inclusion,_ safeguarding aesthetic
+contemplation by drawing whatever is not wholly refractory into
+that contemplation's orbit. This turning of non-aesthetic interests
+from possible competitors and invaders into co-operating allies is an
+incomparable multiplying factor of aesthetic satisfaction, enlarging
+the sphere of aesthetic emotion and increasing that emotion's volume
+and stability by inclusion of just those elements which would have
+competed to diminish them. The typical instance of such a possible
+competitor turned into an ally, is that of the cubic element, which I
+have described (p. 85) as the first and most constant intruder from
+the thought of _Things_ into the contemplation of _Shapes._ For the
+introduction into a picture of a suggested third dimension is what
+prevents our _thinking away from_ a merely two-dimensional aspect
+by supplying subsidiary imaginary aspects susceptible of being
+co-ordinated to it. So perspective and modelling in light and shade
+satisfy our habit of locomotion by allowing us, as the phrase is, _to
+go into_ a picture; and _going into,_ we remain there and establish
+on its imaginary planes schemes of horizontals and verticals besides
+those already existing on the real two-dimensional surface. This
+addition of shapes due to perspective increases the already existing
+dramas of empathy, instead of interrupting them by our looking
+away from the picture, which we should infallibly do if our
+exploring and so to speak _cubic-locomotor_ tendencies were not
+thus employed inside the picture's limits.
+
+This alliance of aesthetic contemplation with our interest in cubic
+existence and our constant thought of locomotion, does more
+however than merely safeguard and multiply our chances of
+empathic activity. It also increases the sensory discrimination, and
+hence pleasureableness, of colour, inasmuch as colour becomes,
+considered as light and shade and _values,_ a suggestion of
+three-dimensional _Things_ instead of merely a constituent of
+two-dimensional _Shapes._ Moreover, one easily tires of "following"
+verticals and horizontals and their intermediate directions; while
+empathic imagination, with its dynamic feelings and frequent
+semi-mimetic accompaniments, requires sufficient intervals of repose;
+and such repose, such alternation of different mental functions,
+isprecisely afforded by thinking in terms of cubic existence.
+Art-critics have often pointed out what may be called the thinness, the
+lack of _staying power,_ of pictures deficient in the cubic element;
+they ought also to have drawn attention to the fatiguing, the almost
+hallucinatory excitement, resulting from uninterrupted attention to
+two-dimensional pattern and architectural outlines, which were,
+indeed, intended to be incidentally looked at in the course of taking
+stock of the cubic qualities of furniture and buildings.
+
+And since the limits of this volume have restricted me to painting as
+a type of aesthetic contemplation, I must ask the Reader to accept on
+my authority and if possible verify for himself, the fact that what I
+have been saying applies, _mutatis mutandis,_ to the other arts. As
+we have already noticed, something analogous to a third dimension
+exists also in music; and even, as I have elsewhere shown,[*] in
+literature. The harmonies accompanying a melody satisfy our
+tendency to think of other notes and particularly of other allied
+tonalities; while as to literature, the whole handling of words, indeed
+the whole of logical thinking, is but a cubic working backwards and
+forwards between _what_ and _how,_ a co-ordinating of items and
+themes, keeping the mind enclosed in one scheme of ideas by
+forestalling answers to the questions which would otherwise divert
+the attention. And if the realisation of the third dimension has come
+to be mistaken for the chief factor of aesthetic satisfaction, this error
+is due not merely to the already noticed coincidence between cubic
+imagination and artistic genius, but even more to the fact that cubic
+imagination is the type of the various multiplying factors by which
+the empathic, that is to say the essentially aesthetic, activity, can
+increase its sphere of operations, its staying power and its intensity.
+
+[*] _The Handling of Words,_ English Review, 1911-12.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+AESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS
+
+OUR examination has thus proceeded from aesthetic contemplation
+to the work of Art, which seeks to secure and satisfy it while
+furthering some of life's various other claims. We must now go back
+to aesthetic contemplation and find out how the beholder meets
+these efforts made to secure and satisfy his contemplative attention.
+For the Reader will by this time have grasped that art can do nothing
+without the collaboration of the beholder or listener; and that this
+collaboration, so far from consisting in the passive "being impressed
+by beauty" which unscientific aestheticians imagined as analogous
+to "being impressed by sensuous qualities," by hot or cold or sweet
+or sour, is in reality a combination of higher activities, second in
+complexity and intensity only to that of the artist himself.
+
+We have seen in the immediately preceding chapter that the most
+deliberate, though not the essential, part of the artist's business is to
+provide against any possible disturbance of the beholder's
+responsive activity, and of course also to increase by every means
+that output of responsive activity. But the sources of it are in the
+beholder, and beyond the control of the most ingenious artistic
+devices and the most violent artistic appeals. There is indeed no
+better proof of the active nature of aesthetic appreciation than the
+fact that such appreciation is so often not forthcoming. Even mere
+sensations, those impressions of single qualities to which we are
+most unresistingly passive, are not pleasurable without a favourable
+reaction of the body's chemistry: the same taste or smell will be
+attractive or repulsive according as we have recently eaten. And
+however indomitably colour- and sound-sensations force themselves
+upon us, our submission to them will not be accompanied by even
+the most "passive" pleasure if we are bodily or mentally out of sorts.
+How much more frequent must be lack of receptiveness when,
+instead of dealing with _sensations_ whose intensity depends after
+all two thirds upon the strength of the outer stimulation, we deal
+with _perceptions_ which include the bodily and mental activities of
+exploring a shape and establishing among its constituent sensations
+relationships both to each other and to ourselves; activities without
+which there would be for the beholder no shape at all, but
+mere ragbag chaos!--And in calculating the likelihood of a
+perceptive empathic response we must remember that such active
+shape-perception, however instantaneous as compared with the cumbrous
+processes of locomotion, nevertheless requires a perfectly
+measurable time, and requires therefore that its constituent processes
+be held in memory for comparison and coordination, quite as much
+as the similar processes by which we take stock of the relations of
+sequence of sounds. All this mental activity, less explicit but not less
+intense or complex than that of logically "following" an argument, is
+therefore such that we are by no means always able or willing to
+furnish it. Not able, because the need for practical decisions hurries
+us into that rapid inference from a minimum of perception to a
+minimum of associated experience which we call "recognising
+things," and thus out of the presence of the perfunctorily dealt with
+shapes. Not willing, because our nervous condition may be unable
+for the strain of shape perception; and our emotional bias (what we
+call our _interest)_ may be favourable to some incompatible kind of
+activity. Until quite recently (and despite Fechner's famous
+introductory experiments) aesthetics have been little more than a
+branch of metaphysical speculation, and it is only nowadays that the
+bare fact of aesthetic responsiveness is beginning to be studied. So
+far as I have myself succeeded in doing so, I think I can assure the
+Reader that if he will note down, day by day, the amount of pleasure
+he has been able to take in works of art, he will soon recognise the
+existence of aesthetic responsiveness and its highly variable nature.
+Should the same Reader develop an interest in such (often
+humiliating) examination into his own aesthetic experience, he will
+discover varieties of it which will illustrate some of the chief
+principles contained in this little book. His diary will report days
+when aesthetic appreciation has begun with the instant of entering a
+collection of pictures or statues, indeed sometimes pre-existed as he
+went through the streets noticing the unwonted charm of familiar
+objects; other days when enjoyment has come only after an effort of
+attention; others when, to paraphrase Coleridge, _he saw, not felt,
+how beautiful things are;_ and finally, through other varieties of
+aesthetic experience, days upon which only shortcomings and
+absurdities have laid hold of his attention. In the course of such
+aesthetical self-examination and confession, the Reader might also
+become acquainted with days whose experience confirmed my never
+sufficiently repeated distinction between _contemplating Shapes and
+thinking about Things_; or, in ordinary aesthetic terminology
+between _form_ and _subject._ For there are days when pictures or
+statues will indeed afford pleasurable interest, but interest in the
+things _represented,_ not in the _shapes;_ a picture appealing even
+forcibly to our dramatic or religious or romantic side; or
+contrariwise, to our scientific one. There are days when he may be
+deeply moved by a Guido Reni martyrdom, or absorbed in the
+"Marriage a la Mode"; days when even Giorgione's Pastoral may (as
+in Rossetti's sonnet) mean nothing beyond the languid pleasure of
+sitting on the grass after a burning day and listening to the plash of
+water and the tuning of instruments; the same thought and emotion,
+the same interest and pleasure, being equally obtainable from an
+inn-parlour oleograph. Then, as regards scientific interest and pleasure,
+there may be days when the diarist will be quite delighted with a
+hideous picture, because it affords some chronological clue, or new
+point of comparison. "This _dates_ such or such a style"--"_Plein
+Air_ already attempted by a Giottesque! Degas forestalled by a Cave
+Dweller!" etc. etc. And finally days when the Diarist is haunted by
+the thought of what the represented person will do next: "Would
+Michelangelo's Jeremiah knock his head if he got up?"--"How will
+the Discobolus recover when he has let go the quoit?"--or haunted
+by thoughts even more frivolous (though not any less aesthetically
+irrelevant!) like "How wonderfully like Mrs So and So!" "The living
+image of Major Blank!"--"How I detest auburn people with
+sealing-wax lips!" _ad lib._
+
+Such different _thinkings away from the shapes_ are often traceable
+to previous orientation of the thoughts or to special states of body
+and feelings. But explicable or not in the particular case, these
+varieties of one's own aesthetic responsiveness will persuade the
+Reader who has verified their existence, that contemplative
+satisfaction in shapes and its specific emotion cannot be given by the
+greatest artist or the finest tradition, unless the beholder meets their
+efforts more than half way.
+
+The spontaneous collaboration of the beholder is especially
+indispensable for Aesthetic Empathy. As we have seen, empathic
+modes of movement and energy and intention are attributed to
+shapes and to shape elements, in consequence of the modes of
+movement and energy involved in mere shape perception; but shape
+perception does not necessarily call forth empathic imagination. And
+the larger or smaller dynamic dramas of effort, resistance,
+reconciliation, cooperation which constitute the most poignant
+interest of a pictorial or plastic composition, are inhibited by bodily
+or mental states of a contrary character. We cease to _feel_
+(although we may continue, like Coleridge, to _see_) that the lines
+of a mountain or a statue _are rising,_ if we ourselves happen to feel
+as if our feet were of lead and our joints turning to water. The
+coordinated interplay of empathic movement which makes certain
+mediaeval floor patterns, and also Leonardo's compositions, into
+whirling harmonies as of a planetary system, cannot take place in
+our imagination on days of restlessness and lack of concentration.
+Nay it may happen that arrangements of lines which would flutter
+and flurry us on days of quiet appreciativeness, will become in every
+sense "sympathetic" on days when we ourselves feel fluttered and
+flurried. But lack of responsiveness may be due to other causes. As
+there are combinations of lines which take longer to perceive
+because their elements or their coordinating principles are
+unfamiliar, so, and even more so, are there empathic schemes (or
+dramas) which baffle dynamic imagination when accustomed to
+something else and when it therefore meets the new demand with an
+unsuitable empathic response. Empathy is, even more than mere
+perception, a question of our activities and therefore of our habits;
+and the aesthetic sensitiveness of a time and country (say the
+Florentine fourteenth century) with a habit of round arch and
+horizontals like that of Pisan architecture, could never take with
+enthusiasm to the pointed ogeeval ellipse, the oblique directions and
+unstable equilibrium, the drama of touch and go strain and resistance,
+of French Gothic; whence a constant readmission of the round
+arched shapes into the imported style, and a speedy return to the
+familiar empathic schemes in the architecture of the early
+Renaissance. On the other hand the persistence of Gothic detail in
+Northern architecture of the sixteenth and occasionally the
+seventeenth century, shows how insipid the round arch and straight
+entablature must have felt to people accustomed to the empathy of
+Gothic shapes. Nothing is so routinist as imagination and emotion;
+and empathy, which partakes of both, is therefore more dependent
+on familiarity than is the perception by which it is started: Spohr,
+and the other professional contemporaries of Beethoven, probably
+heard and technically understood all the peculiarities of his last
+quartets; but they liked them none the better.
+
+On the other hand continued repetition notoriously begets
+indifference. We cease to look at a shape which we "know by heart"
+and we cease to interpret in terms of our own activities and
+intentions when curiosity and expectation no longer let loose our
+dynamic imagination. Hence while utter unfamiliarity baffles
+aesthetic responsiveness, excessive familiarity prevents its starting
+at all. Indeed both perceptive clearness and empathic intensity reach
+their climax in the case of shapes which afford the excitement of
+tracking familiarity in novelty, the stimulation of acute comparison,
+the emotional ups and downs of expectation and partial recognition,
+or of recognition when unexpected, the latter having, as we know
+when we notice that a stranger has the trick of speech or gesture of
+an acquaintance, a very penetrating emotional warmth. Such
+discovery of the novel in the familiar, and of the familiar in the new,
+will he frequent in proportion to the definiteness and complexity of
+the shapes, and in proportion also to the sensitiveness and steadiness
+of the beholder's attention; while on the contrary "obvious" qualities
+of shape and superficial attention both tend to exhaust interest and
+demand change. This exhaustion of interest and consequent demand
+for change unites with the changing non-aesthetic aims imposed on
+art, together producing innovation. And the more superficial the
+aesthetic attention given by the beholders, the quicker will style
+succeed style, and shapes and shape-schemes be done to death by
+exaggeration or left in the lurch before their maturity; a state of
+affairs especially noticeable in our own day.
+
+The above is a series of illustrations of the fact that aesthetic
+pleasure depends as much on the activities of the beholder as on
+those of the artist. Unfamiliarity or over-familiarity explain a large
+part of the aesthetic non-responsiveness summed up in the saying
+_that there is no disputing of tastes._ And even within the circle of
+habitual responsiveness to some particular style, or master, there are,
+as we have just seen, days and hours when an individual beholder's
+perception and empathic imagination do not act in such manner as to
+afford the usual pleasure. But these occasional, even frequent, lapses
+must not diminish our belief either in the power of art or in the
+deeply organised and inevitable nature of aesthetic preference as a
+whole. What the knowledge of such fluctuations ought to bring
+home is that beauty of shape is most spontaneously and completely
+appreciated when the attention, instead of being called upon, as in
+galleries and concerts, for the mere purpose of aesthetic enjoyment,
+is on the contrary, directed to the artistic or "natural" beauty of
+shapes, in consequence of some other already existing interest. No
+one except an art-critic sees a new picture or statue without first
+asking "What does it represent?"; shape-perception and aesthetic
+empathy arising incidentally in the examination which this question
+leads to. The truth is that even the art-critic is oftenest brought into
+enforced contemplation of the artistic shape by some other question
+which arises from his particular bias: By whom? of what precise
+date? Even such technical questions as "where and when restored or
+repainted?" will elicit the necessary output of attention. It is possible
+and legitimate to be interested in a work of art for a dozen reasons
+besides aesthetic appreciation; each of these interests has its own
+sentimental, scientific, dramatic or even moneymaking emotion; and
+there is no loss for art, but rather a gain, if we fall back upon one of
+them when the specific aesthetic response is slow or not
+forthcoming. Art has other aims besides aesthetic satisfaction; and
+aesthetic satisfaction will not come any the quicker for turning our
+backs upon these non-aesthetic aims. The very worst attitude
+towards art is that of the holiday-maker who comes into its presence
+with no ulterior interest or business, and nothing but the hope of an
+aesthetic emotion which is most often denied him. Indeed such
+seeking of aesthetic pleasure for its own sake would lead to even
+more of the blank despondency characteristic of so many gallery
+goers, were it not for another peculiarity of aesthetic responsiveness,
+which is responsible for very puzzling effects. This saving grace of
+the tourist, and (as we shall see) this pitfall of the art-expert, is what
+I propose to call the _Transferability of Aesthetic Emotion._
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE STORAGE AND TRANSFER OF EMOTION
+
+IN dealing with familiarity as a multiplying factor of aesthetic
+appreciation, I have laid stress on its effect in facilitating the
+perception and the empathic interpretation of shapes. But repetition
+directly affects the emotion which may result from these processes;
+and when any emotion has become habitual, it tends to be stored in
+what we call memory, and to be called forth not merely by the
+processes in which it originated, but also independently of the whole
+of them, or in answer to some common or equivalent factor. We are
+so accustomed to this psychological fact that we do not usually seem
+to recognise its existence. It is the explanation of the power of words,
+which, apart from any images they awaken, are often irresistibly
+evocative of emotion. And among other emotions words can evoke
+the one due to the easy perception and to the life-corroborating
+empathic interpretation of shapes. The word _Beautiful,_ and its
+various quasi synonyms, are among the most emotionally suggestive
+in our vocabulary, carrying perhaps a vague but potent remembrance
+of our own bodily reaction to the emotion of admiration; nay even
+eliciting an incipient rehearsal of the half-parted lips and slightly
+thrown-back head, the drawn-in breath and wide-opened eyes, with
+which we are wont to meet opportunities of aesthetic satisfaction. Be
+this last as it may, it is certain that the emotion connected with the
+word _Beautiful_ can be evoked by that word alone, and without an
+accompanying act of visual or auditive perception. Indeed beautiful
+shapes would lose much of their importance in our life, if they did
+not leave behind them such emotional traces, capable of revival
+under emotionally appropriate, though outwardly very dissimilar,
+circumstances; and thereby enormously increasing some of our
+safest, perhaps because our most purely subjective, happiness.
+Instead therefore of despising the raptures which the presence of a
+Venus of Milo or a Sixtine Madonna can inspire in people
+manifestly incapable of appreciating a masterpiece, and sometimes
+barely glancing at it, we critical persons ought to recognise in this
+funny, but consoling, phenomenon an additional proof of the power
+of Beauty, whose specific emotion can thus be evoked by a mere
+name and so transferred from some past experience of aesthetic
+admiration to a. present occasion which would otherwise be mere
+void and disappointment.
+
+Putting aside these kind of cases, the transfer (usually accomplished
+by a word) of the aesthetic emotion, or at least of a willingness for
+aesthetic emotion, is probably one of the explanations of the spread
+of aesthetic interest from one art to another, as it is the explanation
+of some phases of aesthetic development in the individual. The
+present writer can vouch for the case of at least one real child in
+whom the possibility of aesthetic emotion, and subsequently of
+aesthetic appreciation, was extended from music and natural scenery
+to pictures and statues, by the application of the word _Beautiful_ to
+each of these different categories. And something analogous
+probably helped on the primaeval recognition that the empathic
+pleasures hitherto attached to geometrical shapes might be got from
+realistic shapes, say of bisons and reindeer, which had hitherto been
+admired for their lifelikeness and skill, but not yet subjected to any
+aesthetic discrimination (_cf_. p. 96). Similarly, in our own times,
+the delight in natural scenery is being furthered by the development
+of landscape painting, rather than furthering it. Nay I venture to
+suggest that it was the habit of the aesthetic emotion such as
+mediaeval men received from the proportions, directions, and
+coordination of lines in their cathedrals of stone or brick which set
+their musicians to build up, like Browning's _Abt Vogler,_ the soul's
+first balanced and coordinated dwellings made of sounds.
+
+Be this last as it may, it is desirable that the Reader should accept,
+and possibly verify for himself, the psychological fact of the
+_storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion._ Besides, the points
+already mentioned, it helps to explain several of the cruxes and
+paradoxes of aesthetics. First and foremost that dictum _De
+Gustibus non est disputandum_ which some philosophers and even
+aestheticians develop into an explicit denial of all intrinsic
+shape-preferences, and an assertion that _beautiful_ and _ugly_ are merely
+other names for _fashionable_ and _unfashionable, original_ and
+_unoriginal,_ or _suitable_ and _unsuitable._ As I have already
+pointed out, differences of taste are started by the perceptive and
+empathic habits, schematically various, of given times and places,
+and also by those, especially the empathic habits, connected with
+individual nervous condition: people accustomed to the round arch
+finding the Gothic one unstable and eccentric; and, on the other
+hand, a person taking keen pleasure in the sudden and lurching lines
+of Lotto finding those of Titian tame and humdrum. But such
+intrinsically existing preferences and incompatibility are quite
+enormously increased by an emotional bias for or against a
+particular kind of art; by which I mean a bias not due to that art's
+peculiarities, but preventing our coming in real contact with them.
+
+Aesthetic perception and especially aesthetic empathy, like other
+intellectual and emotional activities, are at the mercy of a hostile
+mental attitude, just as bodily activity is at the mercy of rigidity of
+the limbs. I do not hesitate to say that we are perpetually refusing to
+look at certain kinds of art because, for one reason or another, we
+are emotionally prepossessed against them. On the other hand, once
+the favourable emotional condition is supplied to us, often by means
+of words, our perceptive and empathic activities follow with twice
+the ease they would if the business had begun with them. It is quite
+probable that a good deal of the enhancement of aesthetic
+appreciation by fashion or sympathy should be put to the account,
+not merely of gregarious imitativeness, but of the knowledge that a
+favourable or unfavourable feeling is "in the air." The emotion
+precedes the appreciation, and both are genuine.
+
+A more personally humiliating aesthetic experience may be
+similarly explained. Unless we are very unobservant or very
+self-deluded, we are all familiar with the sudden checking (often almost
+physically painful) of our aesthetic emotion by the hostile criticism
+of a neighbour or the superciliousness of an expert: "Dreadfully
+old-fashioned," "_Archi-connu,_""second-rate school work,"
+"completely painted over," "utterly hashed in the performance" (of a
+piece of music), "mere prettiness"--etc. etc. How often has not a
+sentence like these turned the tide of honest incipient enjoyment;
+and transformed us, from enjoyers of some really enjoyable quality
+(even of such old-as-the-hills elements as clearness, symmetry,
+euphony or pleasant colour!) into shrivelled cavillers at everything
+save brand-new formulae and tip-top genius! Indeed, while teaching
+a few privileged persons to taste the special "quality" which
+Botticelli has and Botticelli's pupils have not, and thus occasionally
+intensifying aesthetic enjoyment by distinguishing whatever
+differentiates the finer artistic products from the commoner, modern
+art-criticism has probably wasted much honest but shamefaced
+capacity for appreciating the qualities common, because
+indispensable, to, all good art. It is therefore not without a certain
+retributive malignity that I end these examples of the storage and
+transfer of aesthetic emotion, and of the consequent bias to artistic
+appreciation, with that of the Nemesis dogging the steps of the
+connoisseur. We have all heard of some purchase, or all-but-purchase,
+of a wonderful masterpiece on the authority of some famous
+expert; and of the masterpiece proving to be a mere school
+imitation, and occasionally even a certified modern forgery. The
+foregoing remarks on the storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion,
+joined with what we have learned about shape-perception and
+empathy, will enable the Reader to reduce this paradoxical enormity
+to a natural phenomenon discreditable only when not honestly
+owned up to. For a school imitation, or a forgery, must possess
+enough elements in common with a masterpiece, otherwise it could
+never suggest any connexion with it. Given a favourable emotional
+attitude and the absence of obvious _extrinsic_ (technical or
+historical) reasons for scepticism, these elements of resemblance
+must awaken the vague idea, especially the empathic scheme, of the
+particular master's work, and his name--shall we say Leonardo's?--will
+rise to the lips. But _Leonardo_ is a name to conjure with, and
+in this case to destroy the conjurer himself: the word _Leonardo_
+implies an emotion, distilled from a number of highly prized and
+purposely repeated experiences, kept to gather strength in respectful
+isolation, and further heightened by a thrill of initiate veneration
+whenever it is mentioned. This _Leonardo-emotion,_ once set on
+foot, checks all unworthy doubts, sweeps out of consciousness all
+thoughts of inferior work (_inferiority_ and _Leonardo_ being
+emotionally incompatible!), respectfully holds the candle while the
+elements common to the imitation and the masterpiece are gone over
+and over, and the differentiating elements exclusively belonging to
+Leonardo evoked in the expert's memory, until at last the objective
+work of art comes to be embedded in recollected masterpieces
+which impart to it their emotionally communicable virtue. And
+when the poor expert is finally overwhelmed with ridicule, the
+Philistine shrewdly decides that a sham Leonardo is just as good as a
+genuine one, that these are all matters of fashion, and that there is
+really no disputing of tastes!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+AESTHETIC IRRADIATION AND PURIFICATION
+
+THE storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion explain yet another
+fact, with which indeed I began this little book: namely that the
+word _Beautiful_ has been extended from whatever is satisfactory in
+our contemplation of shapes, to a great number of cases where there
+can be no question of shapes at all, as in speaking of a "beautiful
+character" and a "fine moral attitude"; or else, as in the case of a
+"beautiful bit of machinery," a "fine scientific demonstration" or a
+"splendid surgical operation" where the shapes involved are not at
+all such as to afford contemplative satisfaction. In such cases the
+word _Beautiful_ has been brought over with the emotion of
+satisfied contemplation. And could we examine microscopically the
+minds of those who are thus applying it, we might perhaps detect,
+round the fully-focussed thought of that admirable but nowise
+_shapely_ thing or person or proceeding, the shadowy traces of
+half-forgotten shapes, visible or audible, forming a halo of real aesthetic
+experience, and evoked by that word _Beautiful_ whose application
+they partially justify. Nor is this all. Recent psychology teaches that,
+odd as it at first appears, our more or less definite images, auditive
+as well as visual, and whether actually perceived or merely
+remembered, are in reality the intermittent part of the mind's
+contents, coming and going and weaving themselves on to a
+constant woof of our own activities and feelings. It is precisely such
+activities and feelings which are mainly in question when we apply
+the words _Beautiful_ and _Ugly._ Thus everything which has come
+in connexion with occasions for satisfactory shape-contemplation,
+will meet with somewhat of the same reception as that shape-contemplation
+originally elicited. And even the merest items of information which
+the painter conveys concerning the visible universe; the merest
+detail of human character conveyed by the poet; nay even the
+mere nervous intoxication furnished by the musician, will all be
+irradiated by the emotion due to the shapes they have been conveyed
+in, and will therefore be felt as beautiful.
+
+Moreover, as the "beautiful character" and "splendid operation" have
+taught us, rare and desirable qualities are apt to be contemplated in a
+"platonic" way. And even objects of bodily desire, so long as that
+desire is not acute and pressing, may give rise to merely
+contemplative longings. All this, added to what has previously been
+said, sufficiently explains the many and heterogeneous items which
+are irradiated by the word _Beautiful_ and the emotion originally
+arising from the satisfied contemplation of mere shapes.
+
+And that this contemplation of beautiful shapes should be at once so
+life-corroborating and so strangely impersonal, and that its special
+emotion should be so susceptible of radiation and transfer, is
+sufficient explanation of the elevating and purifying influence which,
+ever since Plato, philosophers have usually ascribed to the Beautiful.
+Other moralists however have not failed to point out that art has,
+occasionally and even frequently, effects of the very opposite kind.
+The ever-recurrent discussion of this seeming contradiction is,
+however, made an end of, once we recognise that art has many aims
+besides its distinguishing one of increasing our contemplation of the
+beautiful. Indeed some of art's many non-aesthetic aims may
+themselves be foreign to elevation and purification, or even, as for
+instance the lewd or brutal subjects of some painting and poetry, and
+the nervous intoxication of certain music, exert a debasing or
+enervating influence. But, as the whole of this book has tried to
+establish, the contemplation of beautiful shapes involves perceptive
+processes in themselves mentally invigorating and refining, and a
+play of empathic feelings which realise the greatest desiderata of
+spiritual life, viz. intensity, purposefulness and harmony; and such
+perceptive and empathic activities cannot fail to raise the present
+level of existence and to leave behind them a higher standard for
+future experience. This exclusively elevating effect of beautiful
+shape as such, is of course proportioned to the attention it receives
+and the exclusion of other, and possibly baser, interests connected
+with the work of art. On the other hand the purifying effects of
+beautiful shapes depend upon the attention oscillating to and fro
+between them and those other interests, e.g. _subject_ in the
+_representative_ arts, _fitness_ in the _applied_ ones, and
+_expression_ in music; all of which non-aesthetic interests benefit
+(enhanced if noble, redeemed if base) by irradiation of the nobler
+feelings wherewith they are thus associated. For we must not forget
+that where opposed groups of feeling are elicited, whichever
+happens to be more active and complex will neutralise its opponent.
+Thus, while an even higher intensity and complexity of aesthetic
+feelings is obtained when the "subject" of a picture, the use of a
+building or a chattel, or the expression of a piece of music, is in
+itself noble; and a Degas ballet girl can never have the dignity of a
+Phidian goddess, nor a gambling _casino_ that of a cathedral, nor
+the music to Wilde's Salome that of Brahms' _German Requiem,_
+yet whatever of beauty there may be in the shapes will divert the
+attention from the meanness or vileness of the non-aesthetic
+suggestion. We do not remember the mercenary and libertine
+allegory embodied in Correggio's _Danae,_ or else we reinterpret
+that sorry piece of mythology in terms of cosmic occurrences, of the
+Earth's wealth increased by the fecundating sky. Similarly it is a
+common observation that while _unmusical_ Bayreuth-goers often
+attribute demoralising effects to some of Wagner's music, the
+genuinely musical listeners are unaware, and usually incredulous, of
+any such evil possibilities.
+
+This question of the purifying power of the Beautiful has brought us
+back to our starting-point. It illustrates the distinction between
+_contemplating an aspect_ and _thinking about things,_ and this
+distinction's corollary that shape as such is yon-side of _real_ and
+_unreal,_ taking on the character of reality and unreality only
+inasmuch as it is thought of in connexion with a _thing._ As regards
+the possibility of being _good_ or _evil,_ it is evident from all the
+foregoing that _shape as shape,_ and without the suggestion of
+things, can be evil only in the sense of being ugly, ugliness
+diminishing its own drawbacks by being, _ipso facto,_ difficult to
+dwell upon, inasmuch as it goes against the grain of our perceptive
+and empathic activities. The contemplation of beautiful shape is, on
+the other hand, favoured by its pleasurableness, and such
+contemplation of beautiful shape lifts our perceptive and empathic
+activities, that is to say a large part of our intellectual and emotional
+life, on to a level which can only be spiritually, organically, and in
+so far, morally beneficial.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+CONCLUSION (EVOLUTIONAL)
+
+SOME of my Readers, not satisfied by the answer implicit in the last
+chapter and indeed in the whole of this little book, may ask a final
+question concerning our subject. Not: What is the use of Art? since,
+as we have seen, Art has many and various uses both to the
+individual and to the community, each of which uses is independent
+of the attainment of Beauty.
+
+The remaining question concerns the usefulness of the very demand
+for Beauty, of that _Aesthetic Imperative_ by which the other uses
+of art are more or less qualified or dominated. In what way, the
+Reader may ask, has sensitiveness to Beauty contributed to the
+survival of mankind, that it should not only have been preserved and
+established by evolutional selection, but invested with the
+tremendous power of the pleasure and pain alternative?
+
+The late William James, as some readers may remember, placed
+musical pleasure between sentimental love and sea-sickness as
+phenomena unaccountable by any value for human survival, in fact
+masteries, if not paradoxes, of evolution.
+
+The riddle, though not necessarily the mystery, does not consist in
+the survival of the aesthetic instinct of which the musical one is a
+mere sub-category, but in the origin and selectional establishment of
+its elementary constituents, say for instance space-perception and
+empathy, both of which exist equally outside that instinct which is a
+mere compound of them and other primary tendencies. For given
+space-perception and empathy and their capacity of being felt as
+satisfactory or unsatisfactory, the aesthetic imperative is not only
+intelligible but inevitable. Instead therefore of asking: Why is there a
+preference for what we call Beauty? we should have to ask: why has
+perception, feeling, logic, imagination, come to be just what it is?
+Indeed why are our sense-organs, our bodily structure and chemical
+composition, what they are; and why do they exist at all in
+contradistinction to the ways of being of other living or other
+inanimate things? So long as these elementary facts continue
+shrouded in darkness or taken for granted, the genesis and
+evolutional reason of the particular compound which we call
+aesthetic preference must remain only one degree less mysterious
+than the genesis and evolutional reason of its psychological
+components.
+
+Meanwhile all we can venture to say is that as satisfaction derived
+from shapes we call _beautiful,_ undoubtedly involves intense,
+complex, and reiterative mental activities, as it has an undeniable
+power for happiness and hence for spiritual refreshment, and
+as it moreover tends to inhibit most of the instincts whose
+superabundance can jeopardise individual and social existence, the
+capacity for such aesthetic satisfaction, once arisen, would be
+fostered in virtue of a mass of evolutional advantages which are as
+complex and difficult to analyse, but also as deep-seated and
+undeniable, as itself.
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+I.      _Lipps._ Raumaesthetik, Leipzig, 1897.
+         "       Aesthetik, vol. I. part ii., Leipzig, 1906.
+II.     _Karl Groos._ Aesthetik, Giessen, 1892.
+         "       Der Aesthetische Genuss, Giessen, 1902.
+III.    _Wundt._ Physiologische Psychologie (5th Edition, 1903), vol.
+III. pg. 107 to 209. But the whole volume is full of indirect
+suggestion on aesthetics.
+IV.     _Muensterberg._ The Principles of Art Education, New York,
+1905. (Statement of Lipps' theory in physiological terms.)
+V.      _Kuelpe._ Der gegenwaertige Stand der experimentellen
+Aesthetik, 1907.
+VI.     _Vernon Lee and Anstruther-Thomson._ Beauty and Ugliness,
+1912 (contains abundant quotations from most of the above works
+and other sources).
+VII.    _Ribot._ Le Role latent des Images Motrices. Revue
+Philosophique, March 1912.
+VIII.   _Witasek._ Psychologie der Raumwahrnehmung des Auges
+(1910). These two last named are only indirectly connected with
+visual aesthetics.
+
+For art-evolutional questions consult:
+IX.     _Haddon._ Evolution in Art, 1895.
+X.      _Yrjoe Hirn._ Origins of Art, Macmillan, 1900.
+XI.     _Levinstein._ Kinderzeichnungen, Leipzig, 1905.
+XII.    _Loewy._ Nature in early Greek Art (translation), Duckworth,
+1907.
+XIII.   _Delia Seta._ Religione e Arte Figurata, Rome, 1912.
+XIV.    _Spearing._ The Childhood of Art, 1913.
+XV.     _Jane Harrison._ Ancient Art and Ritual, 1913.
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Aesthetic:
+     aridity, 136-7;
+     imperative, 99-100;
+     irradiation, 147-52;
+     purification, 149-52;
+     responsiveness, active nature of, 128-36;
+     habit and familiarity affecting, 134-6
+Altamira cave frescoes, 95
+Art:
+     differential characteristic of, 116-18;
+     non-aesthetic aims of, 99-100, 137-8; utility of, 153-5
+Aspect:
+     aesthetics concerned with, 15, 21, 105;
+     shape the determining feature of, 26-8
+Attention, a factor distinguishing perception from sensation, 32
+
+Balfour, H., 95
+Beautiful:
+     aesthetic irradiation proceeding from use of adjective, 147-8;
+     attitude implied by use of adjective, 2-7, 18-19;
+     empathy the chief factor of preference, 67-8;
+     implies desire for reiterated perception, 53-4
+Botticelli, 83
+Brahms' _German Requiem,_ 150
+Browning's _Abt Vogler,_ 141
+
+Coleridge's _Ode to Dejection,_ 131
+Colour, passive reception of, 23-4, 29
+Contemplative satisfaction marking aesthetic attitude, 8-15
+Correggio's _Danae,_ 151
+Cubic Existence:
+     perception of, 85;
+     pictorial suggestion of, importance attached to, discussed, 101-5
+
+_Discobolus,_ 115
+
+Einfuehlung, 59;
+     misinterpretations of, 66-7
+Emotion, storage and transfer of, 139-46
+Empathy, 61-69;
+     complexity of movements of lines, 78-83;
+     movements of lines, 70-77;
+     second element of shape-perception, 59-60
+Extension existing in perception, 35-8
+
+Fechner, 130
+
+Hildebrand, 102, 118
+
+Inner Mimicry, 74-5
+
+James, W., 153
+
+Keats' _Grecian Urn,_ 77
+
+Levinstein, 96
+Lipps, 66
+Locomotion of Things, distinction between, and empathic
+movement of lines, 111-16
+Lotze, 66
+
+Mantegna, 82
+Memory:
+     a factor distinguishing perception from sensation, 32;
+     in perception, 40-1
+Michel Angelo, 114, 122
+Movement of Lines, distinction between, and locomotion of Things,
+111-16; _see also_ Empathy
+
+Object of Perception, subject's activities merged in, 57, 58
+
+Perception:
+     active process involved in, 29-34, 128-9;
+     distinguished from sensation, 32;
+     subject and object of, 55-60
+
+Raphael's _Heliodorus,_ 119
+Relaxation an element of form-perception, 42
+Rembrandt, 122
+Rythm, 42-5
+
+Semper, hypothesis regarding shape-preference, 94
+Sensations:
+     distinguished from perceptions, 32;
+     perception of relation between, 29-30
+Shape:
+     character of, 78-83;
+     contemplation of, its intermittent but recurrent character, 106-10;
+     determines contemplation of an aspect, 26-8;
+     elements of, 35-47;
+     Empathy an element of perception of, 59;
+     facility and difficulty of grasping, 48-54;
+     a perception, 29-34;
+     practical causes regarding evolution of, 90-4;
+     preference, its evolution, 94-7;
+     and Things, their co-operation, 117-27;
+     thinking away from, to Things, 131-2, 84-9
+Sound, passive reception of, 23-4, 29
+Subject of perception, extent of awareness of self, 57-9
+Symmetry, 42-3
+
+Tension, an element of form-perception, 42
+Things and Shapes, their cooperation, 117-27;
+     thoughts about, entering into shape-contemplation, 84-9
+Third Dimension, locomotor nature of knowledge of, 85-6, 101
+Titchener, 59
+
+Vinci, Leonardo da, 83, 145-6
+Vischer, 66
+
+Watts, G. F., 46
+Whole and Parts, perception of relation of, 48-54
+Wilde's _Salome,_ 150
+Wundt, 42, 66
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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