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, ar
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.
More
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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 c... 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 behold... 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 belo... 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 notice... 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 ... 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 ... 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... 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. S... 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 extend... 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 readin... 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 individu... 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 a... 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... 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 a... 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 clearin... 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 Critici... 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 c... 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 ... 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 abo... 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 suc... 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 fr...