that these records are wont to contain reflexions which, though
wanting in scientific precision, can be utilized by science.
Psychological analysis of material.
We now come to the work of scientific construction proper.
The finer analysis of the objects which please aesthetically
as well as of the agreeable type of consciousness to which
they minister belongs to the psychologist, and it is noteworthy
that the best recent contributions to the science have been
made by men who were either known as psychologists or at least
had trained themselves in psychological analysis. A word or
two must suffice to indicate the more important directions
of the theoretic interpretation. We may in illustrating this
set out from the convenient triple division of the factors in
aesthetic experience: (A) the sensuous, (B) the perceptual or
formal, (C) the imaginative, including all that is suggested
by the aesthetic presentation, its meaning and expressiveness.
The sensuous factor. Physiological aesthetics.
(A) In dealing with the sensuous factor the psychologist is
materially aided by the physiologist. It is sufficient to
point to the contribution made to the analysis of musical
sensations by the classical researches of Helmholtz (see
below). Yet the application of a knowledge of physiological
conditions seems as yet to be of little service when we
come to the finer aspects of this sensuous experience,
to the subtle effects of colour combination, for example,
and to the nuances of feeling-tone attaching to different
tints. In the finer analysis of the sensuous material of
aesthetic enjoyment it is the psychologist who counts.22
Psychological problems.
Among the valuable contributions recently made in this domain
one may instance the careful determination of the aesthetically
important characteristics of the sensations of sight and hearing,
such as the finely graduated variety of their qualities (colour
and tone), their capability of entering into combinations
in which they preserve their individuality, including the
important combinations of time and space form. With these
are to be included the distinguishing characteristics of the
concomitant feeling-tones, e.g. their comparative calmness
and their clear separation from the sensations which they
accompany. These characteristics help us to understand
the greater refinement of these senses and also the more
prolonged as well as varying enjoyment which they contribute,
as well as the extension of this enjoyment by imaginative
reproduction.23 Next to this determination of important
aesthetic characteristics of the two senses may be named a
finer probing of the nuances of pleasurable tone exhibited by
the several colours and tones. A point still needing special
investigation is extent of the sensuous factor in aesthetic
enjoyment. There has been a tendency in aesthetic theory
to over-intellectualize aesthetic experience and to find
the value even of the sensuous factor in some intellectual
principle, as when it is said (by Plato and Hegel among
others) that a smooth or level tone and a uniform mass of
colour owe their value to the principle of unity. But such
prolongation (within obvious limits) in time or space is a
condition of the full enjoyment of the distinctive quality
of an individual tone or colour, and as such has a sensuous
value. Aesthetics has to prove the sensuous value, the
pleasure which is due not only to the feeling-tones of the
several sensations but to those of their variods combinations.
Spite of a tendency of late to disparage the co-operation of
the ``motor sensations'' connected with movements of the eye
in the aesthetic appreciation of linear form, e.g. curves,
evidence suggests that certain curves, like fine gradations
of colour, may owe a considerable part of their value to
a mode of varying the sensuous experience which is in a
peculiar manner agreeable. On the other hand, this theoretic
investigation of sense-material will need to determine with
care the added value due to the action of experience in giving
something of meaning to particular colours and tones and
their combinations, e.g. warmth of colour, height of tone.
The perceptual factor.
(B) Under the scientific treatment of the perceptual or
formal factor in aesthetic experience we have many special
problems, of which only a few can be touched on here. Taking
this factor to include all combinations of elements in which
there is a more or less distinct perception of pleasing
relations, we meet here with such work as that of C. Stumpf
(Ton-psychologie) in determining the way in which tones
combine and tend to fuse. Later experiments have added to our
knowledge of the obscure subject of colour harmony, enabhng
us to distinguish pleasing contrasts of colour from the more
restful combinations of nearly allied tints. Our knowledge
of pleasing form in the narrower sense, that is to say,
space and time form, has been advanced by a number of recent
inquiries. The value of symmetry, the meaning of proportion
and the aesthetic value to be set on certain proportions,
the forms of these are some of the points dealt with in more
central and in special works24. In the case of forms,
still more than in that of sensuous elements, it is needful to
determine the extent to which the value of the formal aspect
is modified by experience and the acquisition of meaning.
This is pretty certainly the source of the aesthetic value
claimed for certain proportions, whether in the human figure
or other organic forms or in the freer constructions of form
in art.25 Another problem is to determine the influence of
the feeling-tones of the combining elements on the pleasing
character of the whole. It is probable that a particular
combination of colours owes something of its pleasure value
to a harmony of the feeling-tones of the elements. This
is pretty certainly the case where the feeling-tones of the
elements are closely akin, as in the case of a number of low
tones of colours, or of architectural or other forms where
one formal element--say, a vertical line, a rectangle of a
certain proportion or a particular variety of arch--repeats
itself and becomes a dominating feature of the whole.
The imaginative factor.
(C) The imaginative factor---which corresponds with what
Fechner calls the ``indirect''---includes all that imaginative
activity adds to our enjoyment when we contemplate an aesthetic
object. It may consist first of all in recalling concrete
experiences firmly associated with the object, as when the
sight of wild-flowers in a London street calls up an image
of fields and lanes. In order that these images may add to
the aesthetic value of the object they must correspond to
our common associations, as distinguished from accidental
individual ones. A large increase of aesthetic enjoyment
comes to us through such suggested images. Although in
general it is images of concrete objects which are called
up, ideas of a more abstract character may take part though
they tend in this case to assume a concrete aspect. This is
illustrated in the appreciation of ``typical beauty'' in which
a concrete form represents in an exceptional way the common
form of a species, and in that of symbolic representation.
An important part of this work of association is to render
objects expressive of mental states, as when we read off the
particular shade of feeling expressed by a natural scene.26
Freer play of imagination.
In the poetic contemplation of nature, her forces, her gladness
and other moods, this imaginative activity, though still deriving
leading to an investment of natural objects with a new and more
fanciful meaning, as when we ``apperceive'' a willow drooping
over a pond or the front of an old cottage under a quasi-human
form, endowing it with something akin to our own feelings and
memories. What, it may be asked, is the whole range of this
freer play of a life-giving fancy in our aesthetic enjoyment?
Some recent theorists have attempted to answer this question
by saying that it constitutes a vital element in all aesthetic
contemplation. Th. Lipps and others who follow him seek to
show that this vitalizing activity of the fancy, which produces
a new and illusory object, is the essential ingredient in
the aesthetic enjoyment of the forms of material objects.
According to this theory, when in the aesthetic mood I enjoy
the form of a tree, of a church steeple or of the front of
a Greek temple, I am not only ascribing life and feeling to
it, but am projecting myself in fancy into the object thus
constructed, feeling for the moment that I am the tree or the
steeple. The process of vivification is carried out as
follows. Lines represent certain movements, and in the
aesthetic mood we translate all lines and so all forms back
into the corresponding movements, which may be merely imagined
(as Lipps himself thinks, or may be realized in part by
sensuous elements, viz. motor sensations; which again may
be regarded either as concomitants of eye movements, or as
arising from an organically connected impulse to move the hand
along the lines followed by the eye.27 Thus the columns of
a temple represent upward movement, and are apperceived as
striving upwards so as to resist the downward pressure of the
entablature. Since movements are the great means of expression
in man, this imaginative reading of movement into motionless
and even massive and stable forms enables us to endow them
with quasi-human feelings. In looking, for example, at
the weighty masses of a building we enter sympathetically
into the successful strivings of the supporting structures
to resist the downward thrust of gravity in the supported
masses. The theory here briefly indicated28 is interesting
as illustrating an attempt from the psychological side to find a
scientific support for philosophic idealism or expressionalism.
It is already beginning to be recognized in Germany as an
exaggeration. It may be enough to say that as applied to forms
generally, including those of sculpture and architecture, the
theory is opposed by our ordinary way of speaking, which implies
quite another point of view in the aesthetic contemplation
of form, namely, that of a spectator external to the object
contemplated. When our eye glides over the beauties of a
statue, our imaginative activity so far from transporting us
within the object carries us as tactual feelers outside the
surface. Similarly, when we delight in the divided spaces
of a Gothic roof, so far from being imaginatively engaged in
taking part in the efforts and strains of pillar, arch and
the rest, we move in fancy along the pathways defined by the
designer, tactually feeling and appreciating each dimension,
each detail of form. The attempt to force a theory fitted
for poetry on sculpture and architecture would rob these of
their distinctive aesthetic values; in the one case, of the
plastic beauty of finely moulded marble surfaces as realized
by imaginative excursions of the hand; and in the other
case, of the perfect stillness and stability which give
to great structures their solemn and quieting aspect.29
Aesthetic Illusion.
The theory of a vitalizing play of imagination (Einfuhlung)
running through all modes of aesthetic contemplation is an
exaggeration of the element of illusion which certainly characterizes
this contemplation. As suggested above, by blotting out for
the moment the perception of all save that which pleases it
substitutes a new for the more solid reality of our practical
mood. Moreover, as a state of perceptual absorption in which
