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 nev...
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. Psyc...
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...
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 con...
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 o...
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...
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...
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 possi...
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 sh...
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...
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 gr...
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 i...
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 mu...
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 tell...
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 satisfactor...
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 leisu...
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,...
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...
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...
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 mo...
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...