as well as in those natural dispositions which prompt one person to prefer motor images, another visual, another audile,Variations of imaginative activity. will modify the process in this enjoyable enlargement and transformation of what is presented to sense. It is for aesthetics at once to recognize these variations of imaginative activity and to determine the more common and universal directions which it follows.
The recent inquiry into our way of contemplating form is, in spite of exaggeration, valuable as showing that our distinctions of form and expression are not absolute. Just as there is the rudiment of ideal significance in colour, not so form, even in its more abstract and elementaryForm and expression not absolutely distinct. aspects, is not wholly expressionless, but may be endowed with something of life by the imagination. The recognition of this truth does not, however, affect the validity of our treating form and expression as two broadly distinguishable factors of aesthetic pleasure. A line may be pleasing to sense-perception, and in addition illustrate expressional value by suggested ease of movement or pose. Similarly, a concrete form, e.g. that of a sculptured human figure in repose, or of a graceful birch or fern, owes its aesthetic value to a happy combination of pleasing lines and of interesting ideas.
In close connexion with the determination of the imaginative factor in aesthetic contemplation, the psychologist is called on to define the special characteristics of aesthetic emotion. That our attitude when we watch a beautiful object, say the curl of a breaker as it falls, or some Aesthetic emotion.choice piece of sculpture, is an emotional one is certain, and ingenious attempts have been made by Home (Lord Kames) and others to equip the emotion with a full accompaniment of corporeal activity, such as heightened respiratory activity.[1] Yet aesthetic emotion is to be contrasted with the more violent and passionate state of love and other emotions, and this difference calls for further investigation. A closer inquiry into the features of that calm yet intense emotion which a rapt state of aesthetic contemplation induces is a necessary preliminary to a scientific demarcation of the sphere of beauty in the narrow or more exclusive sense, from that of the sublime, the tragic and the comic. Each of these departments of aesthetic experience has well-marked emotional characteristics; and the definition of these “modifications of the beautiful” has in the main been reached through an analysis of the emotional states involved. This chapter in the psychological treatment of aesthetic experience has to consider two points which have occupied a prominent place in aesthetic theory. The first is the nature of “revived” or “ideal” emotion, such as is illustrated in the feeling excited sympathetically when we witness or hear of another’s sorrow or joy. The second point is the nature of those mixed emotional states which are illustrated in our aesthetic enjoyment of the sublime and the other “modifications,” in all of which we can recognize a kind of double emotional consciousness in which painful elements accompany and modify pleasurable ones, in such a manner that in the end the latter appear to be rather strengthened than weakened.[2]
The psychological treatment of aesthetic data here sketched out cannot stop at an analysis of the aesthetic state or attitude into a number of recognizable elements each of which contributes its own quantum of pleasurableness.Limits of analysis
in aesthetics. Our enjoyment in contemplating, say, a green alp set above dark crags, is an indivisible whole. And it is a consciousness of this fact which makes men disposed to resent the dissection of their aesthetic enjoyment into a number of constituent pleasures. Nor is this all. Every aesthetic object is something unique, differing in individual characteristics from all others; and as the object, so the mood of the contemplator. One may almost say that there are as many modes of musical delight as there are worthy compositions. It would seem either that this feeling of a unique indivisible whole must be dismissed as an illusion, or that we have to admit an unexplained residue in our aesthetic experience, which may some day be explained by help of a larger and more exact conception of aesthetic harmony, of the laws of interaction and of fusion of psychical elements.[3]
We may now glance at the ideal purpose of this scientific analysis and interpretation, namely, the construction of norms or regulative principles corresponding to the severally essential elements of aesthetic value ascertained. The later psychological treatment of the subject has led Construction of aesthetic norms.up to the formulation of certain ideal requirements in beautiful objects. The work of Fechner in this direction (Vorschule der Ästhetik) was a noteworthy contribution to this kind of construction, at once scientific and directed to the construction of ideal demands, and is still a model for workers in the same field. He has taught us how the attempt to formulate one all-comprehensive principle—e.g. unity in variety, has led to a barren abstractedness, and that we need in its place a number of more concrete principles. In formulating these principles care must be taken to determine their respective scopes and their mutual relations—to decide, for example, whether expression, to which our modern feeling undoubtedly ascribes a high value, is a universal demand in the same sense as unity or harmony of parts is admitted to be. A system of norms must further supply some comprehensive criterion by help of which degrees of aesthetic value may be determined, as determined by the degrees of completeness of the several pleasurable activities,—sensuous, perceptual and imaginative,—and justify the form of judgment “this object is more beautiful (or of a higher kind of beauty) than that.” Such regulative principles and standards of comparison will, it is clear, fail us just at the point where analysis stops. Edmund Gurney urges that an aesthetic principle such as unity in variety is complied with equally well by musical compositions which are commonplace and leave us cold and by those which evoke the full thrill of aesthetic delight, and he concludes that the special beauty of form in the latter instance is appreciated by a kind of intuition which cannot be analysed (see The Power of Sound, ix.). The argument is hard to combat. It would seem that after all our efforts to define aesthetic qualities and enumerate corresponding ideal requirements we are left with an unexplained remainder. This can only be tentatively defined as the concrete object itself in its wholeness, which is not only a perfectly harmonized combination of sensuous, formal and expressional values, but impresses us as something which has a fresh individuality and the distinction of aesthetic excellence.
Aesthetics is wont to treat of a certain kind of experience as if it were a closed compartment. Yet there is in reality no such perfect seclusion. Our enjoyment of beauty, though to be distinguished from our intellectual and our practical interests, touches and interacts with these.Connexion between aesthetic and other experience: (a) with intellectual interests. With regard to intellectual interests it is clear that much of the mental activity which enters into our aesthetic enjoyment is intellectual—e.g. in the perception of the relations of form, even though it stops short of the abstract analysis of scientific observation. Again, in appreciating beauty of type which involves according to Taine a recognition of the most important characters of the species, we are, it is evident, close to the scientific point of view. Similarly, when scientific knowledge enables us in the mood of aesthetic contemplation to retrace imaginatively the mode of formation of a cloud or a mountain form, or the mode in which a climbing plant finds its way upwards. It is for aesthetics to recognize the fact, and to discriminate a
- ↑ See a curious passage in Home’s Elements of Criticism, chap. iv., in which the emotions excited by great and elevated objects are said to express themselves externally by a special inflating inspiration, and by stretching upward and standing “a-tiptoe” respectively; also an article on “Recent Aesthetics”, by Vernon Lee in the Quarterly Review, 1904, part i. pp. 420-443.
- ↑ See Hume, Essays, “Essay of Tragedy,” and the important discussions on the meaning of Aristotle’s doctrine of the emotions of tragedy and of emotional purification or “alleviating discharge”, (κάθαρσις) touched on by Bosanquet, op. cit. pp. 64 ff. and 234 ff.
- ↑ That beauty implies a peculiar blending of formal and spiritual (geistige) factors is recognized by H. Riegel, Die bildende Künste; pp. 16 ff.
