The aesthetic experience; its meaning in a functional psychology ..

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FOUNDED BY JOHN D, ROCKEFELLEK-

THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: ITS

MEANING IN A FUNCTIONAL

PSYCHOLOGY

A DISSERTATION

submitted to the faculty of the graduate school of arts
and literature of the university of chicago in candi-
dacy for the degree of doctor of philosophy

(department of philosophy)

BY

ELIZABETH KEMPER ADAMS

CHICAGO

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

1907

Xtbc mnivcvBit^ ot Cbicaao

FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKBPBLLKR

THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: ITS

MEANING IN A FUNCTIONAL

PSYCHOLOGY

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS
AND LITERATURE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO IN CANDI-
DACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

(department of philosophy)

BY

ELIZABETH KEMPER ADAMS, Ph.D.

CHICAGO

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

1907

CJOPTBIGHT 1906 BT

The Univebsity of Chicago

Published January) 1907

Compoaed and Printed By

The Univeriity of Chicago Preas,

Chicago, Ulinoii, U. S. A.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Part I. The Place of the Aesthetic Experience 5

I. Introduction 5

n. The Functional Position 6

m. The General Characteristics of the Aesthetic Experience . . 19

IV. Previous Work in Aesthetics 24

V. Preliminary Definitions 26

VI. The "Aesthetic Moment" in the Reflective Process ... 28

Part II. The Social Aspects of the Aesthetic Experience . . 37

I. Typical Aesthetic Periods in the History of the Race . 37

n. Aesthetic Origins in the Race 47

m. The Social Psychology of the Aesthetic Experience . 65

Part HI. Specific Aesthetic Categories and Types of Aesthetic

Experience 87

I. The Specific Aesthetic Categories 87

n. The Types of Aesthetic Experience 96

Part IV. Some Philosophical Implications of the Aesthetic

Experience 108

Index 113

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PART I ^ . '_ . -V ^ ^

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
I. INTRODUCTION

Functional psychology as a method for the reformulation in terms of
concrete experience of both psychologic and philosophic problems has
hitherto been focused on those types of conscious experience the recon-
structive character and bearings of which are most obvious. In the field
of psychology proper it has dealt with the act of attention; in logic, with
the judgment process; in ethics, with the winning of new ends for con-
duct; in metaphysics, with problems of epistemology rather than with
problems of ontology. Although postulating the more immediate and
direct forms of experience as marking the limits of every reconstructive
process and furnishing the key to its explanation, and although pointing
out the continual disintegration and redintegration of one type of experience
into the other, it has nevertheless treated immediate, satisfactorily "work-
ing" experience only incidentally and with reference to the group of prob-
lems just mentioned; and has made, so far as I know, no detailed study
of its various aspects and problems.

This emphasis is due, no doubt, partly to the inherent difficulty of
analyzing immediate experience, since it functions as a whole and there-
fore without revealing its constituent elements; partly to the influences
under which functional psychology began to take shape as a system; and
partly to the newness of the whole method, which is, in fact, only just
becoming aware of its full implications, and has not yet had time to state,
much less to solve, all its problems. But now, on the one hand, its own
achievements are pushing it on to further inquiry into its assumptions,
and, on the other hand, certain familiar and frequently discussed kinds
of experience are crying for investigation and restatement.

Conspicuous among these last is .the aesthetic experience, a mental
attitude as distinct and luminous in actual life as it is baffling and opaque
for theory. At first sight it offers some paradoxes peculiarly difficult of reso-
lution from the functional point of view.'^ It accordingly challenges atten-
tion as a sort of test case, and invites study for the sake of the functional
position in general, no less than because of its intrinsic interest. While I
shall not attempt, in this discussion, to solve any of the vexing problems of

I Cf. F. H. Bradley, "On Truth and Practice," Mind, N. S., Vol. XIII, pp. 320,
334, 335-

S

1^

...6...... V ;. THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

aesthetics, yet I venture to hope that a somewhat fresh mode of approach
and an endeavor to deal with them in connection with other problems may
set them in a new light, if only by doing away with their isolation.

I shall devote the first part of my study to a preliminary sur\'ey of the
functional position and to an account of the commonly recognized char-
acteristics of the aesthetic experience, bringing the two into some sort of
provisional relation through the pointing-out of an essentially aesthetic
moment or stage in the activity of reflective thinking, the process most
fully analyzed by functional psychology and revealing most satisfactorily
the complex make-up of concrete experience. Upon this placing of the
aesthetic I shall base my working hypothesis of the aesthetic as a sign and
"function" of full and successful mental operation. In Part II I shall
seek to corroborate this view by turning from individual to race experience
and presenting briefly the social situation in some of the most striking
"aesthetic periods" of history, together with a review of the probable
social origins of the aesthetic experience. This survey will lead directly to
the statement and development of the thesis that the aesthetic finds its
fullest meaning and explanation as a category of social psychology, and to
a discussion from this point of view of some of the disputed points in aesthe-
tic doctrine and of some of the current aesthetic theories. In Part III I
shall endeavor to test my hypothesis still further, and to justify my conclu-
sions by inquiring how far the conventional aesthetic categories and types
lend themselves to such interpretation. In Part IH I shall point out briefly
some philosophic implications of this position.

n. THE FUNCTIONAL POSITION

"Functional psychology'" is a current name for a method of looking at
the facts of conscious experience that is not yet ripe for exhaustive definition.
Its aim may be roughly stated as an attempt to define mental phenomena
in terms of the control of experience. It strives to revivify psychological
abstractions by restoring them to their original bed in concrete human
action. It elevates to a postulate of scientific thinking a truth that has
always been taken for granted in everyday life — that nobody ever thinks or
feels or acts at large, but always with reference to a particular end, growing
out of a particular set of conditions and realized in a particular kind of
behavior. It insists upon the continuity of experience, but lays stress
upon the fact that this experience is not to be thought of "in the lump,"
as something fixed in quantity and quality, but as in process of continual
reconstitution, consolidation, and enlargement through the setting-up and
carrying-out of new ends. It points out that all forms of consciousness

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 7

arc to a greater or less degree purposive, anticipatory in reference, looking
forward to new modes of action; that reconstructions and recapitulations
of past experiences always occur in connection with this management of
the future; that the real test and standard of any conscious experience
reside, not within itself, but in the conduct to which it leads. It holds
that valid psychological generalization does not consist in classifying
mental activities entirely apart from the situations in which they arise and
terminate, but rather in accordance with the typical features in various
groups of situations. To put it briefly, functional psychology is a psychol-
ogy of the entire act, and not merely of that phase of the act that is com-
monly identified as mental.^

Such a conception of the scope and character of psychology obviously
breaks down the hard and fast distinction generally made between psy-
chology proper — the science describing and analyzing mental processes as
such, without regard to the value of their outcome — and the so-called
normative or valuational disciplines of logic, ethics, and aesthetics, dealing
respectively, it is said, with value in knowledge, value in conduct, and
value in appreciation or feeling — that is, with the worth of mental operations
rather than with the operations themselves. While, in the interests of a
practical division of labor, it is undeniably useful and even necessary to
keep these fields distinct from psychology, and while in each field the
investigator approaches his problems at a dififerent angle and with different
stress, yet from the point of view here sketched it is out of the question to
consider psychological processes apart from their source and their issue in
conduct, their place in the experiential series. A psychology that does not
take into account this backward and forward reference to conduct is doomed
f^ to remain at the level of a merely descriptive science.'
^ I In other words, conscious processes have no significance, no reason for
i< ' being, aside from the work they do, the use they serve in the upbuilding of
^ / our world of concrete values. All forms of consciousness whatever are
/ possessed of meaning, of reference to something beyond, and the "norma-
tive disciplines" represent only formulations of the most conspicuous
instances of such values. In the workings of habit, in the countless small
determinations and adjustments of daily life, even in vague organic feelings
of comfort and discomfort, there is always some purposive coloring, some

» A fundamental statement of this view is given in Professor John Dewey's " Reflex
Are Concept in Psychology," Psychological Review, Vol. III.

' For an admirable discussion of the relations of psychology and the normative
disciplines see Professor J. R. Angell's paper, "The Relations of Structural and
Functional Psychology to Philosophy," Philosophical Review, Vol. XII, No. 3.

8 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

attitude or adaptation of the organism with respect to the situation in which
it finds itself, and thus directly or indirectly with respect to its own conduct
in the immediate future. This does not mean that the value always presents
itself to the mind as an end. It is frequently inherent in the activity as a
whole, and detaches itself only for the observer, the psychologist, not for
the person involved in the experience. To state it in terms of a distinction
often made nowadays: consciousness is always valuational psychologically;
it is valuational psychically only under appropriate conditions, which I
shall discuss later.

With this limitation we may describe consciousness as awareness of
values, or, perhaps more cautiously, as registration of values. This descrip-
tion implies two characteristics of consciousness that are often emphasized —
its efficiency as an agency of control and as an agency of selection ; in other
words, its backward and its forward reference. In our new eagerness to
point out that consciousness functions as an instrument for controlling
further behavior, we are in danger of underestimating the aspect that
used to be considered of primary importance — its dealings with our past
experiences. In its extreme form the older view held that "ideas" were
mere copies of events. The truth is that neither aspect can be considered
intelligibly without the other. As valuational, conscious experience faces
both ways. In every situation there is use of just so much of past experi-
ence as is needed for the efficient control of the matter in hand. At every
step there is elimination, reshaping, synthesis, but always under guidance of
the emerging end. The past is drawn upon for means; it represents the
means available. But in the interaction of means and ends, each is
modified. The bare end as first before the mind is very different from
what may be called the efficient end, ready to discharge into overt action.
It has become both enriched and defined through the intermediate survey
and selection of past experiences. It is easily seen that the selective
character of consciousness is most conspicuous in those cases in which a
new end is to be attained.

Bound up with this evaluating, selective, controlling character of con-
sciousness is its aspect of objective reference, which is, indeed, only another
way of stating its essential nature. Consciousness, as I have already said,
always points beyond itself. It is never mere consciousness in general, a sort
of abiding entity back of particular experiences, but always a consciousness
of something, whether it be of a tree, a movement, an emotion, or a mathe-
matical formula.* On one side it indicates the individual's direction of

« Cf. William James, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. I, No. 18.

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 9

interest at that particular time ; on the other, it stands for something with
regard to which he may act, with which he may do something. This
"object" to which consciousness refers, which forms its core, as it were,
need not, of course, be situated in the external world of space. It may be
thought of as within the organism, or as "only in the mind." But, what-
ever the direction of the reference, the object does not merely happen to be
there; it is there because it is the center of a cluster of specific activities. It
is, indeed, a construction of those activities, never a mere external "given."
It marks a certain point in their interrelation and reorganization.^

In general, then, we may say that functional psychology conceives of
human experience as a continuous series of attempted or achieved modes of
control of behavior. Through all the bewildering richness and complexity
of actual living, with its countless instances of doing and thinking, succeed-
ing and faiUng, hating and loving, suffering and enjoying, it traces the
waves of an unceasing but intricate and varied rhythm, one pulse of con-
sciousness emerging from another and passing over into a third, different
from either, but affected by both. It finds its problems in determining the
conditions and characteristics of these several types, their relations to one
another, their own internal make-up. It does not neglect the structural
aspects of mind that bulk so large in the traditional psychology — a charge
brought against it chiefly on the strength of its name; but it seeks to place
them within a specific process, as limiting terms or stages of that process.
It reads off the accepted psychological categories — sensation, perception,
memory, imagination, association, habit, attention, volition, and the like —
in terms of kinds and degrees of control. This insistence upon the funda-
mental significance of the cdncept of control does not mean, however, that
functional psychology considers only those types of experience that are
most obviously utilitarian and "objective" in the popular sense of the
word. It aims to account for the operations of the most abstract reflective
thought, for the subtlest nuances of feeling and mood, for the pleasures of
contemplation and day-dreaming as well as for more immediately practical
and strenuous forms of mental life.

A moment's glance at the course of everyday experience is sufficient to
show us that this process of gaining control, of maturing our plans for action,
is not uniform in its operation. Experience in the loose popular sense
as well as experience psychologically considered has its "substantive" and
its "transitive" phases, to use James's well-known and admirable descrip-
tive terms. It is made up of an "alternation of flights and perchings."

I J. Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory, X, "Valuation as a Logical Process" (H.
W. Stuart), pp. 250-53.

lO THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

That is to say, there are times when our mental activity flows smoothly
over into outward acts — or, rather, when we do not become aware of any
separation between the two sorts of activity. The mere suggestion of a
familiar end, the mere identification of a stimulus, brings about at once the
appropriate response. In recent psychology much has been made of the
importance of habit, "the fly-wheel of society." But even yet we recognize
imperfectly the extent to which it governs whole reaches of our lives.
Dressing and undressing, eating at certain times and in certain ways, keep-
ing routine engagements, carrying on skilled operations, associating with
family and friends, speaking, walking, gesticulating, and a thousand other
minor adjustments, are regulated by habits of every degree of complexity
and certainty. We do these things as a matter of course, without "stopping
to think about them," as we say; and our "consciousness" of them is
nothing more than a diffused feeling of satisfactory performance.

But there are other times when it is not so easy to carry on some of our
pursuits. A difficulty, an obstacle of some sort, turns up, and interferes
with our accustomed ways of doing things. This interference may issue
from ourselves, from people about us, from "things" in the physical world.
But in every case its effect is to arrest our course of action at the time, to
throw us back temporarily upon ourselves, to reveal a cleft between what
we think and what we can do. We have to attend to the disturbance, to
"think it over," and to adjust both ourselves and our surroundings before
we can proceed on our way — rejoicing or not, as the case may be. Such
interruption, of course, may range from the slightest momentary pause and
feeling of tension to a cataclysm that paralyzes effort and even destroys
life. Between these limits the checking of overt action may be stated
in psychological terms as a clash and conflict between habits or groups of
habits. Instead of functioning independently or reinforcing one another,
they inhibit; and none is able to reach its normal outlet in conduct. If
such collision be violent, our first feehng is that of shock, bare "sensation;"
passing quickly into an unpleasantly emotional condition of bewilder-
ment, confusion, dismay. But, unless the situation is so overpowering
that we are crushed by it or forced to abandon it altogether, this emotional
reaction resolves itself into an attempted investigation of the situation, a
scrutinizing and marshaling of its lacks and its resources, in order to dis-
cover how it may be modified and once more rendered available for conduct.
This focusing of attention upon the various elements of the situation, this
"reflecting upon it," which is, indeed, literally a bending or turning back
upon it, brings to light with increasing definiteness both means and end or
ends, until at last they coalesce sufficiently for the resumption of action. It

/n

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE II

is essential to notice, moreover, that such an operation of thought not only
heals a temporary breach in our world of experience, but actually makes
over a portion of that world, and so affects the whole. The line of action
that we carry out after the resolution of our difficulty is never exactly what
we should have done had not the break intervened.

Such an account, brief as it is, reveals the essentially reconstructive,
reorganizing, instrumental character of reflective thought. It arises in a
disturbed situation within which control has become for the time impossible ;
it transforms that situation so that it may be again controlled — that is to say,
acted upon. In one sense, to be sure, it is in itself activity of the most
intense kind ; but it is activity temporarily detached from the world of out-
ward conduct and concerned with the upbuilding of a new conscious content
which is to serve as a plan of action. As such, it may fairly be set over
against the action that follows upon the construction of this content.^

We find, then, two broad types of conscious experience — immediate or 7

constitutive experience, and mediate or reflective experience. Both are ' >

equally immediate in the sense of occurring at a particular present time;
but reflective thought obviously bears a relation to conduct different from
the relation sustained to it by constitutive thought. Immediate experience
may be most broadly characterized as habitual; mediate, as attentive.
Neither tj'pe exists at large or apart from the other. Stated in general
terms, they represent limits of one process, and any particular experience
stands merely for a special emphasis on one aspect or the other. But for
purposes of reflective analysis it is important to distinguish them. Reflec-
tion arises as a method of dealing with some hitch in practice; its results
survive and become embodied in practice, to be again challenged and
revised by thought on the appearance of a new emergency. Every psy-
chological habit has thus been originated under the pressure of attention.*

To the reflective or judging process we shall return briefly later. Here
we need to examine immediate experience more fully. In all its myriacl
forms and gradations we recognize certain common characteristics. In'
the first place, the situation does not polarize itself. With the reaction fol-
lowing hard upon the heels of the suggestion or stimulus, we are aware of
the act as a whole. Our interest, our sense of activity, is diffused over the
entire situation. Either there is no recognition of the end or purpose as
apart from the actual accomplishment, or, if it be present, it serves merely
as a momentary cue, lapsing from consciousness after it has set in motion

I Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory, XI, "Some Logical Aspects of Purpose"
(A. W. Moore), pp. 350-52.

' Ibid., II, "Thought and Its Subject-Matter" (Dewey), pp. 42,43.

12 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

the appropriate habitual responses. There is no defining of the end or
searching for the means to that end, and consequently no opposition of
means to ends. Neither do we set the self over against the object. Con-
sciousness is not self-consciousness. There is no antagonism between
the subjective self and a recalcitrant objective world.

In the second place, and as a consequence of this lack of division within
the situation, immediate experience is unaccompanied by the feelings of
compulsion or of effort. In one sense, it may be objected, it touches the
high-water mark of compulsion. We cannot help having the experience.
We do the thing before we know it. We are compelled to do it. It is
imposed upon us. This is all very true. But the compulsion resides
within the general setting of the experience; it is a product of many past
experiences. It is not, to the person involved, a conscious accompaniment
of the immediate experience, although he may notice it in later reflection
upon the event. As it occurs, its inevitableness is for him the happiest
spontaneity. Only for the psychologist is it to be read in terms of compul-
sion. Just here we see the confusion of psychological points of view that
lies at the root of the free-will controversy. It is an instance of that insidious
foe, the psychologist's fallacy.

The feeling of effort, too, the straining to achieve an end, to discover
fitting means, or the struggle between competing ends, is of necessity
excluded from immediate experience. Accepting the view of the conscious-
ness of effort as marking an intermediate and incomplete stage in the recon-
structive process^ — a view that seems to me irrefutable from the functional
standpoint — I find no place for effort in the foregoing account of immediate
experience. As unitary the experience cannot be described in terms derived
from another type of situation. Both compulsion and effort characterize the
problematic, disturbed situation, not the satisfactory situation. This by
no means implies, however, that a feeling of activity is wanting to immediate
experience. Such a feeling or successful functioning is not to be confused
with effort, which is the consciousness of unsuccessful or incomplete
functioning.

This mention of the feeling of activity, which may frequently be
described as interest and even as pleasantness, leads us to ask concerning
the conditions of its appearance. It lis not present, at least to any observ-
able degree, in many cases of immediate experience. The indifference of
routine activities is notorious; they too often dip to the pole of unpleasant-
ness; monotony leads to boredom, ennui. In other cases they soon reach

» Dewey, "The Psychology of Effort," Philosophical Review, Vol. VI.

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE I3

the automatic level, and we carry them on while giving our attention to
other things. In fact, under normal conditions we must do so.

But in more complicated forms of activity, in which integrated groups
of habits are employed and function smoothly and simultaneously, we have
often a highly pleasurable sense of the putting-forth of energy. There is a
real glow of satisfaction in accomplishing a piece of work varied enough to
hold attention, and yet with all its details thoroughly mastered. It is this
type of consciousness that we call the feeling of activity, as distinguished
from the feeling of effort experienced in setting up a new co-ordination. In
such cases it is evident that our experience is of the immediate type only
because it has become so thoroughly mediated. It is woven of the results
of past reflective processes, past acts of attention; it is shot through with
previously attained values. The sense of activity, therefore, attaches to
habitual activities of a relatively complex type, drawing adequately upon
the motor resources of the organism, and not forcing those that are unexer-
cised into perverted and abortive functioning. In other words, it is a pro-
duct of a cluster of simultaneous and tolerably well co-ordinated reactions,
while it is lacking in reactions that are markedly serial, each serving merely
as a stimulus and then lapsing from consciousness. Such reactions are
indifferent or positively unpleasant.

Into the physiological aspects of these types of immediate experience I
do not intend to enter, save in the most cursory way. But in the functional
conception of the establishment of new co-ordinations the physiological
and the psychological are most intimately conjoined. Each, indeed, is an
abstraction without the other; and purposive consciousness takes its place
in the organic evolutionary series as a superior means developed through
natural selection for resolving tensions, and thus for setting up new co-
ordinations.^ From this point of view there can be no such thing as an
entirely static or passive conscious experience, even when consciousness is
at its lowest ebb ; and mind manifests itself at its highest degree of activity
when it focuses upon tensional situations and acts as an agency of recon-
struction and control. Physiology and psychology meet on common
ground in the modern doctrine of impulse, though at the present stage of
our knowledge any account is bound to be chiefly in physiological terms,
and to be at best only a coarse description. Tendency to movement is taken
as the fundamental characteristic of living matter; and an organism so high
in the biologic scale as is the human being is found to possess^ in addition to
established co-ordinations mediating physiological processes and a limited
number of definite instincts, a large equipment of open or loose impulses

I Angell, Psychology, p. 7.

14 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

or tendencies to action, discharging indiscriminately upon the presentation
of any stimukis, and often apparently at random, through the presence of
some intra-organic stimulating condition. At this stage we find adjustment
and control at their lowest terms and in their most rudimentary form. We
may rather say that in unco-ordinated impulse we have the raw material for
co-ordination and control. But given these unstable and vague impulses
and a highly plastic nervous tissue modified by every discharge of activity,
changes are bound to occur. Impulses come into conflict with one another
through simultaneous responses to different or to ambiguous stimuli.
Their pathways of discharge intercept, and the impulses are mutually
checked or inhibited. Gathering momentum from this damming-up, they
struggle to break through a new channel into which they may both escape.
If they succeed in doing this, each is modified in the process; a new line of
egress has been made; and they eventually reinforce instead of inhibiting
one another. In other words, a co-ordination has been set up ; the impulses
function together in one system, instead of independently and often antago-
nistically. Roughly, this is the history of all sensori-motor co-ordinations.
-The systems become more and more intricate, gathering to themselves
Ivarious lesser systems, but at the same time simplifying and unifying. As
/jthe organization becomes elaborate, consciousness becomes more and more
dominant. Immediate experience is, on the physiological side, established
co-ordination.

For the most part modern psychology has ignored the transformations
in the other aspect of the situation — the stimulus. But the process on the
side of the organism is meaningless taken apart from the occasion which
gives it direction. From a bare opportunity for the discharge of an urgent
impulse, a mere point of irritation, one may almost say, the stimulus at last
becomes the object, a center for any number of responses and manipula-
tions. How does this come about ?

The most satisfactory attempt at explanation seems to me to lie along
the' lines of certain recent theories regarding the nature of the psychological
image, although the problems involved have not yet been worked out to
entire satisfaction. Since the days of Galton's "breakfast-table" ques-
tionary the psychology of imagery has been greatly to the fore. The various
kinds of images — visual, auditory, motor, etc. — have been studied with
painstaking detail. But the accounts given have been almost wholly
descriptive, structural. The image of whatever type has been dealt with
in isolation, as a mental product, an event, to be analyzed and classified.
Taken thus, it has been thought of chiefly as a memory-image, a "copy,"
of past experience, though worn down and altered in one way and another.

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 1 5

Its representative character has been emphasized to the exclusion of other
aspects, and it has been pictured as floating around somehow in the mind,
and as bobbing up sometimes opportunely and sometimes in most unlikely
and unexpected places. Such a treatment of the image gives no satisfactory
answer to the questions of its origin or of its part in the mental economy.
It makes its behavior fortuitous, which is only saying that it is unexplained.
Functional psychology, however, has sought to place the image within the
act, to determine its part in the securing of control over a situation. It
holds that the image normally emerges in response to some exigency of the
present, some demand for controlling the future, and functions as a plan of
action, a map of conduct.^ This plan has necessarily to pass through
various stages and transformations in the course of its construction. It is
revamped, telescoped together, expanded here, pruned there, until the situa-
tion is mastered. Definite memory images arise as there is need of recourse
to past experience, to be thrown aside or worked into the final result. It is
still to be recognized by the majority that memory is a means of dealing with
present and future, and by no means belongs exclusively to a bald "past."
The resultant image is thus assuredly not a mere copy of past experience,
although it has drawn abundantly upon the past for materials. Just here
comes in the whole field of association. Moreover, the equipment of the
image for its work does not depend upon any particular sensory make-up.
It used to be the psychological fashion to restrict the term "image" to the
visual and auditory types. But we know now that all images are more or
less motor; and that images derived from the so-called "lower-senses," or
chiefly kinaesthetic, representing obscure stresses and strains within the
organism, may mediate and direct conduct no less effectually than those
derived from sight and hearing. Mental imagery is not a mere succession
of kinematograph or gramaphone performances. The sensory character
of an image is indifferent. People tend, some to one type, some to another,
or vary as occasion requires. The image has value as a symbol, as a short-
hand statement of certain reactions, not as a picture or echo.

We see, then, that a shifting play of imagery accompanies the process
of reconstructing a situation ; perhaps it would be more accxirate to say that
it is the method by which such reconstruction is accomplished. The account
that I have given, therefore, of the formation of the image is a repetition in
other terms of my account of the process of reflective thought. Imagery
marks tension, revision, reorganization, delayed response to a stimulus,

I Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory, VIII, "Image and Idea in Logic" (W. C.
Gore), pp. 193-99; W. C. Gore, "Image or Sensation," Jour. Philos., Psych, and Sci.
Meth., Vol. I, pp. 434-41; Vol. II, pp. 97-100.

i6 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

because that stimulus is for some reason ambiguous or ill-defined, and needs
to be built up into an object that we can handle with certitude and conse-
quent efficiency. The final image, therefore, coalesces with the object, is
the object from the mental side.

Professor George H. Mead, of the University of Chicago, has put forth
in some unpublished lectures a suggestive theory in terms of impulse and
reaction of the growth of the bare stimulus into the object and, on the other
side, of the growth of the bare sensation into the image or idea. Taking
the ground that the primary datum is the impulse, the tendency to response,
rather than the stimulus or object as in any sense ready-made or "given,"
Professor Mead holds that the definite object arises through a translation
of immediate contact reactions — such as are found in lower organisms —
into distance reactions. That is to say, we recognize a distant object, and
can control and direct our behavior toward it only because it stands for a
number of suppressed contact reactions. Any object — a tree or a chair,
for instance — ^is a cluster of all the possible modes of touching and manipu-
lating it that we do not carry out. It has external existence, bulk, and
solidity for us only as all these incipient activities are aroused and at the
same time inhibited from discharge into gross external movements. Every
image or developed object of consciousness presupposes a series of direct
contacts and a working-over of these into distance equivalents.^ The
special sense-organs, notably the eye, are organs of such translation. The
lowest unicellular organisms expand and contract as a whole only upon
contact with extraneous material; later we find pseudopodia, cilia, tentacles,
etc. — all contact mechanisms. With the evolution of higher forms appear
the distance senses of smell, sight, and hearing, and the human hand is
admittedly an unsurpassed instrument of exploration and delicate contact
discriminations. The image or object, therefore, as built up in human
experience, represents an intricate system of translations, substitutions,
inhibitions. It means on the physiological side a complicated sensori-
motor co-ordination, the welding into a single activity of various minor
reactions once carried on vaguely and independently. Such a view jibes
with the modern dictum that "all consciousness is motor," and with the
more recent and more specific doctrine that consciousness appears and
continues sharpest at points of greatest tension.* Put in this way, the
physiological and the psychological statements of the matter cannot be kept
rigidly distinct. The attempt to do so, indeed, at the present stage of our
I Cf. M. F. Washburn, "A Factor in Mental Development," Philosophical
Review, Vol. XIII, pp. 622-26.

a Angell, Psychology, pp. 7, 50-58.

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 1 7

knowledge of the mechanism of instinct and impulse, is hkely to result in
artificial abstraction. At best our accounts of the details of neuro-muscular
process are doomed to be only crudely figurative.

In accordance with this general conception of the function of the image
within the total co-ordination or act, various aspects of its operation have
been recognized and differentiated. Imagery of the fullest and most vivid
type obviously belongs to the reorganizing and reconstructive moments of
experience. But at the first demand for reconstruction, the first awareness
of hindrance, the stimulus is reacted to immediately rather than interpreted,
and we have an experience that corresponds roughly to the direct contact
reaction of lower forms. Consciousness is of the nature of shock, "pure
sensation," so far as that may exist in higher organisms, except as a mere
artefact of the psychologist. It is rawly affectional and sensational; there
is not yet sufficient organization for the appearance of the image. But
with the dawning of a plan of action, with the search for appropriate means,
the raw sensational material is transmuted into imagery, shifting with
opalescent rapidity. Here enters in the possibility of different types,
depending on the character of the specific situation to be controlled. At
times the end in view is relatively clear;; the problem is the practical one of
discovering ways and means. This leads to a canvassing of one's past
experience; the dominant images are of the memor}' type. It is clear that
the more easily the things symbolized by these images may be obtained,
the less necessity exists for a rich elaboration of the attendant imagery.
Only so much develops as is needed to serve as a cue to conduct. In the
same way the image of the end, at first distinct, lapses to a mere push-button
of control, touching off and guiding the search for materials. Under other
circumstances, however, the end may be the object sought for, and may be
at first extremely shadowy, gaining body and precision only through selec-
tion from an abundant drift of imagery, little of it of the definitely localized
memory type. In any case the resulting image ripe for conduct is different
from the first tentative image of the end. It has developed through constant
interaction with the attendant images, each modifying and reshaping the
other. Moreover, the content of this resulting or "working" image may
differ widely in different cases. One type of problem may be solved serially,
each stage in its accomplishment being attained and dropped behind with-
out contributing materially to the total consciousness of the end. This type
of solution is exemplified in the taking of a journey, the performance of a
household duty, or of any long ])ut routine mechanical task. Everyone
must have within his experience the remembrance of hours and miles
checked off on a time-table, of meals eaten and nights passed on a sleeping-

«

l8 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

car. As each of these steps in the journey is made, it is canceled from the
image of the whole, it drops out and is forgotten as is the paper or the
orange skin one tosses from the car window. The original image of the
journey was a definite core of arrival surrounded by a penumbra made up
of vague images of the drag of time, of heat, motion, and weariness.
The actual happenings strip these off one by one, and they contribute
nothing beyond a faint coloring of relief to the final image and the
experience following upon it.

But take the building and furnishing of a house, the swinging of a big
industrial or military maneuvre — the making of a dress even — to choose
for the present only instances that are not commonly recognized as aesthetic.
Here, too, of course, there is much eUminated, dropped out of the final con-
sciousness, the "working image." But far more fully than in the cases just
cited, the working image has taken up and absorbed into itself the signifi-
cance of the various stages of the process. They have reinforced, enriched
one another and the whole. They are all there, contributing unobtrusively
but pervasively to the general effect. Their order is not serial, but simul-
taneous, co-ordinating, and reinforcing. The perfected image differs from
the ''sketch-image," as it may be called in the way that the completed
house, subtly satisfying in every detail of line and color, differs from the
architect's plans and the decorator's patterns and designs. This type of
image we may call anticipatorily the "aesthetic image" (the term I take
from Professor Mead, though I do not know how fully he would agree
with my interpretation of it). We shall return to it latel", and inquire its
significance for our discussion.

As I said a few paragraphs back, the more readily an image subserves
its purpose of recalling an object or of touching off conduct, the less content
it is obliged to have and the fewer subsidiary images it calls up. In ordinary
immediate experience of the routine habitual type, the image is commonly
shorn to a mere cue or signal, and loses most of its fulness and sensory
character. It becomes a "working image" reduced to its lowest terms,
and verges again upon the immediate stimulus.

We may therefore say of the image from the functional point of view,
that it appears as a mechanism of reconstruction within a disturbed situation
and represents a cluster of mediating and mediated activities. Imagery
emerges after the first shock of sensation; and in the course of revising the
situation assumes broadly one of two types — the serial or the simultaneous
or co-ordinating. The resulting image functioning as a stimulus to overt
action may be of the practical or working type, the result of the serial form
of construction, or of the aesthetic type, the result of the simultaneous form.

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 19

With repeated or habitual use, this resultant image tends to wear down more
and more again to a bare stimulus,
j In this provisional survey of the stand taken by functional psychology I
I have tried to bring out its emphasis upon the constructive character of experi-
1 ence as a process of winning control over specific situations and of conscious-
; ness as the instrument of such reorganization; I have distinguished two
main types or phases of experience — the immediate or habitual, and the
mediate or reflective; and I have indicated the part played by imagery in
such a psychological conception. I shall now give a general and untech-
nical survey of the aesthetic experience as it manifests itself to the average
; person, and as it has been explained and analyzed by certain philosophers
and psychologists.

III. THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

The most psychologically unsophisticated person, if he have any aesthetic
interests, will not hesitate, I think, to range his moments of unmistakable
aesthetic enjoyment — whether of creation or of appreciation — on the side
of immediate rather than of reflective experience. In such moments at
their purest we all have a sense of exemption and release from the pressure
and the precariousness of life. We cease temporarily to "look before and
after, and pine for what is not." We are lapped about by the present
experience, steeped in it, although we do not think of it as present in the
sense of contrasting it with a harassing or insistent past or future. It is
simply experience, full, exhaustive, brimming over with satisfaction. But
this does not mean that it is a passive experience, or a mere state of trance
or ecstasy, although rarely it may approach these limits when we are "rapt"
in aesthetic contemplation. Such a characterization of the aesthetic attitude
is drawn too exclusively from our appreciations of painting and sculpture;
it is only seemingly true even there, as we shall see later. On the contrary,
aesthetic absorption in a drama, a symphony — even in so slight a thing,
in one sense, as a sonnet — may give us a feeling of intense activity. We
are swept along on waves of alternate suspense and relief to a culminating
moment in which every fiber seems to vibrate. Such a state of high stimu-
lation sometimes borders upon the painful, but it is kept from becoming
excessive or exhausting through the rhythmical character of its tensions
and relations, the "pattern" that it assumes. We do not feel overstrained;
we are conscious simply of activity unimpeded and yet regulated, of an
enlargement and quickening of our whole natures, a heightening of vitality.
We breathe deeper; out hearts beat faster; oiur cheeks glow. It seems as
if we were doing easily and spontaneously things that we have hitherto

^ OF THE

UNiVERsnx

20 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

been able to accomplish only with pain and effort. This sense of facilita-
tion, ease, and spontaneity is manifest to some degree in every aesthetic
experience. Although we are usually quiescent so far as outward move-
ments are concerned, we experience in a sort of glorified form the exhilara-
tion that comes ordinarily with certain kinds of successful active exercise.
We have a sense of rich and harmonious employment of many bodily organs,
functioning as it were vicariously. We feel that there exists a peculiar
intimacy between us and the aesthetic object. We enter into it and possess
it ; it enters into and possesses us. More truly, perhaps, we and the object
are fused, blended in a single pulse of experience. Such a state of mind is
obviously strongly emotional; it is suffused with an affective coloring.
These characteristics, however, are implicit and latent in the consciousness
of the subject of the aesthetic thrill. They can be marshaled and described
only by the sympathetic observer, or, by the participator after the experi-
ence has passed; and the experience is fleeting and notoriously difficult to
confine in words. It has been the theme of poets, the subject of an array
of eloquent descriptions. But it still eludes.

Moreover, it is extremely difficult to phrase a general account that
will fit even coarsely the several types of aesthetic experience. Music,
poetry, the plastic and graphic arts, are independent and to a large extent
unique. I have set forth the common characteristics of the more elaborate
and conspicuous instances of the experience. But these characteristics
may be traced even in the simplest observable forms. And they are to be
found in the experience of both the artist, the producer, and the spectator,
the appreciator. In the first they lead to and accompany the technique of
actual production; in the second, to enlargement of view and to renewed
vigor in ordinary occupations. The difference seems to me one of degree,
not one of kind; and I cannot sympathize with the position taken by
such men as Groos* and Marshall" that it is necessary to make a rigid dis-
tinction between the two attitudes. It is undoubtedly necessary to recog-
nize the two forms, but each man has in his degree the sense of expansion,
enhancement, and "wholeness" of life that is the essence of the aesthetic
experience, and that has made it the despair of the scientist and the
inspiration of the poet.

Turning to philosophy and psychology, we find that their accounts of the
aesthetic experience do not go much beyond a systematized statement of
certain aspects patent to the untrained observer. Under some differences

/ I Der aesthetische Genuss, pp. i, 2.

a "Relation of Aesthetics to Psychology and Philosophy," Philosophical Review,
Vol. XIV, pp. 2, 3.

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 21

in terminology, moreover, there is striking unanimity in the descriptions
given by widely differing schools. Over aesthetics, idealists and empiri-
cists appear to join hands, although probably quite inadvertently. The
emphasis upon specific aspects, however, differs with almost every writer.
In general, the accounts given assign the aesthetic experience to what I
have called immediate experience, although the term in this sense is of
recent application, and although Fechner was the first, I believe, to include
"immediacy" among aesthetic criteria.^ All alike make much of its rela-
tive isolation, its detachment from the practical business of life, and its
disinterestedness or lack of specific conscious end. Insistence upon this

I negative aspect has led to the setting-up of the non-utilitarian character of

' the aesthetic experience as its principal criterion, and to its affiliation with
play as a kind of excess discharge, due merely to the presence of a super-
abundance of vital energy. Of late a more scientific and evolutionary view
of play has greatly modified this theory both for play and for aesthetics.
On the positive side writers on aesthetics have accounted for the independ-
ence, the " inclosedness," of the experience on the score of its fulness of
content, its high conscious value; it floods and captures consciousness.
Here again they have compared it to play with respect to its freedom, spon-
taneity, and ease." Aesthetic pleasure has, indeed, been said to be passive
as opposed to the pleasures of play, which are active. 3 But recent psychol-
ogy points out that no type of conscious experience is truly passive. The
distinction is at most a distinction between gross outward movements and
delicate organic reactions, and accordingly furnishes no real criterion.
The tendency at present, on the contrary, is to bring into prominence the

/ activity side of the aesthetic experience. Its extraordinary life-enhancing
qualities are dwelt upon, its power of arousing a feeling of full but harmo-
nious interplay of both organic and mental processes.

A long-accepted and favorite category of aesthetic theory is that of
objectivily. It is not easy always to determine just what is meant by the

/ term as used in aesthetics. Undoubtedly usage differs, and it means differ-
ent things to different writers. Here it is enough to say that' in general it
appears to be used to indicate the fact that the aesthetic object and the
feeling aroused by it are not held apart in the mind of the person having the
aesthetic experience. The self is in a sense identified with the object ; the
"feeling-tone" of the observer is "spread upon" the object. We say that

» Vorschtde der Aesthetik, Vol. I, p. 15.
» George Santayana, The Sense 0} Beauty, pp. 25-30.
-- ' 3 Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, p. 34.

22 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

the object itself is beautiful^ not that we have a feeling of beauty, of aesthetic
satisfaction with regard to the object. The objectivity of the aesthetic is
contrasted with the subjectivity of the merely pleasant. It is in this sense
that Santayana makes objectivity the distinguishing aesthetic criterion. He
defines beauty as "pleasure regarded as the quaUty of a thing. "^ But in
varying degrees such objectivity is characteristic of all forms of immediate
experience. More truly, we do not explicitly refer our experience either to
the subjective or to the objective worlds. Both "subjective" and "objec-
tive" are terms borrowed from mediate or reconstructive experience, and
are therefore misleading in a discussion of the aesthetic.

Closely allied with this category of objectivity are Bain's category of
"shareableness"3 and Kant's famous category of "universality. "4 Both
imply that the peculiar aesthetic tone or quality is thought of as transferred
to the object, inhering in it, and therefore, as a corollary, common to all.
As Professor Tufts points out, "universality" did not mean for Kant that
there must be a uniform judgment with regard to the aesthetic character of
an object, but only that aesthetic value is thought of as objectified. s This
shareableness or universality of the aesthetic is sometimes stated negatively
as disinterestedness or an absence of desire for appropriation on the part of
the observer. But a sounder statement would be that in the aesthetic
experience the rapport between the object and the "subject" is so close
that he already feels himself in possession of it, if the question of possession
can be said to enter in any degree into the experience.

Of recent years aesthetic theory, in reaction from the predominantly
intellectualistic attitude of the older aesthetics, has laid great stress upon the
strongly affective and emotional aspects of the aesthetic experience, as dis-
tinguished from the painful, the fleetingly pleasurable, or the affectively
.indifferent quality of other varieties of immediate experience. Henry
Rutgers Marshall defines the aesthetic as "the permanently pleasurable in
revival." This heightened and widely diffused feeling-tone is also made to
account for the social significance of the aesthetic, the transmission of the
experience to others through sympathy, suggestion, contagion, and the like.
At this point it is enough to mention these developments of aesthetic theory.
We shall later recur to them.

1 Bertihard Berenson, Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, pp. 7-13, 50-54,
70-73-

2 Op. cit., p. 49.

3 The Emotions and the Will, chap, xiv, "The Aesthetic Emotions," pp. 225, 226.

4 Critique of Judgment (translated by Bernard), pp. 55-63.

5 " On the Genesis of the Aesthetic Categories," University of Chicago Decennial
Publications, First Series, Vol. Ill, Part II.

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 23

' To sum up, we find that the naive person and the theorist are tolerably
well agreed in a purely descriptive account of the aesthetic experience.
Among the marks of this experience are said to be its immediacy, its detach-
ment from ulterior ends — that is to say, its non -utilitarian character; its
vitalizing power, its spontaneity, its objectivity, sharableness, or universality
— different terms for practically the same thing — its strong affective
coloring.

Such an account makes no pretense at a real explanation and grounding
of the categories employed. Explanations have been given, of course, from
both the philosophical and the psychological sides. But this is not the
place in which to consider them. I am merely getting before our minds in
the roughest way some of the best-known descriptions of the aesthetic, and
attempting to recall the tang of our own individual aesthetic experiences.

But even mere description reveals/^ some of the paradoxes already
referred to. If consciousness be anticipatory, purposive, an instrument for
seciu-ing control over conduct in specific situations, how does it come about
that an experience said to be devoid of utilitarian or practical significance
should possess a peculiarly high degree of conscious value, should at times
entirely capture consciousness ? If such a pleasurably excited condition of
consciousness be the concomitant of a large number of activities co-operat-
ing with and reinforcing one another, how does it come that the aesthetic
experience is not the outcome of a previous state of agitation and disturb-
ance, but appears to arise without effort on our part ? How should it pro-
duce in us at once a sense of exhilaration, enlargement of capacity, and at
the same time a sense of serenity, of disentanglement from the business of
life, of escape from the " Red Mist of Doing" ? These and similar questions
crowd our minds, and demand resolution of their contradictions.

From the experience of functional psychology in dealing with other
problems we may reasonably conclude that some at least of the enigmas of
aesthetics are due to the treating of the aesthetic experience too much in
* / isolation, to a generalization of its dominant aspects, and a severing of them
from their points of origin and issue in concrete living — that is, from the
situation in which they arise. This failure to mark the initial and terminal
points of attachment is particularly likely to occur in the case of the aesthetic,
which is, as we have seen, a peculiarly self -inclosed experience, seeming to
arise without precedent effort or volition on our part, and to point to no
recognized end. It is no wonder that it was long thought to be the work
of a special inborn sense of faculty of beauty, or even a direct manifestation
of deity itself. Today we are long past the stage of thinking that finds
^1 it necessary to set up special "faculties" to account for mental phenomena;

V

24 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

but even we may be pardoned for finding the aesthetic at first sight a some-
what obdurate exception in a purposive and evolutionary world.

Our main problem is to find a place for the aesthetic in the experiential
series as read by functional psychology, ) But before so doing we shall find
it advantageous to run over some of the work that has already been done
in the aesthetic field.

IV. PREVIOUS WORK IN AESTHETICS

In spite of substantial descriptive agreement, at the outset one is
bewildered and baflBed by the chaotic condition of the literature of the
subject. Imposing in bulk, it is yet written from such differing and often
contradictory points of view that it lends color to the contention that
aesthetics has no right to consider itself a tnie philosophical or normative
discipline.*

The reasons for this incoherence are not far to seek. I have already
spoken of the intrinsic difl&culties of the aesthetic problem. Besides this,
the province of aesthetics lies upon the marches of philosophy; and is fre-
^ ! quentjy invaded — and plausibly claimed — by adventurers from other
' domains. The artist and the art-critic, in whatever medium they work, are
prone to make inquiries into the psychology of their art and even into its
philosophical implications.' The scientist is occasionally drawn into the
study of the growth of some type of art product and its psychological bases.
And of late the anthropologist and the sociologist wax busy over the aesthetic
consciousness as a social phenomenon. All these inquirers handle the
subject according to the bias of their dominant interests, sometimes with a
cheerful disregard of psychology, more often with a blythe confidence in
outworn and discredited psychological doctrines. Even where this is so,
however, they compensate for their naivete by the freshness of their point of
attack and the richness of the new concrete material which they bring
within the scope of aesthetic investigation.

The more professional and academic investigators, too, have approached
the subject from every point of the compass. In the heyday of German
idealism, the new discipline, not long christened, was enlisted in the service
of metaphysics, and rounded out the systems of Kant, Schelling, and
Hegel. With the growth of modern science and the persistence, in Eng-
Jfv« lish thought^ least, of the sturdy empiricism of the eighteenth century,
German idealism fell somewhat into disrepute, and German aesthetic
theory in particular became discredited because of its vague and some-

"i \ I Santayana, "What Is Aesthetics ?" Philosophical Review, Vol. XIII, pp. 320-27.
» Cf. B. Berenson, Vernon Lee, etc.

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 25

what sentimental metaphysical afl&liations. The English mind, moreover,
has never taken kindly to aesthetic questions, and the Utilitarians and
the Assoc iationists generally were engrossed by legal, economic, and ethical
questions. Divorced from metaphysics, aesthetics languished for a while,
and when it revived, it had passed over for the most part into the camp of
empirical psychology and evolutionary biology. There it has tarried, fol-
lowing the fortunes of current psychological and biological thinking.
Herbert Spencer, both in his Synthelic Philosophy and more especially in
his scattered essays on aesthetic topics;^ Grant Allen, in his Physiological
Aesthetics;' and Bain^ and Sully,'* in their clear-cut treatments of the
subject, stand for the best that has been done by the English Associationist
school, and laid the foundations for a science of aesthetics. In Germany,
Zeising,s Fechner,*^ and Lotze' led this scientific movement. With the
development of experimental psychology has come the investigation* of cer-
tain simple and specific aesthetic problems, such as those of space-form,
rhythm, and simple judgments of preference. The pioneer work of this
kind was done by Fechner in his determination of the "golden section" as
the most pleasing division of a line. A long series of similar researches has
since been carried on with increasing mastery of technique, but without
greatly widening the area of the problems studied or reaching important
new conclusions. Recent attention to genetic psychology and interest in
the evolution of mind in the race as well as in the individual have given a
new importance and a strong sociological and anthropological coloring to
aesthetic investigations and formulations. Study of peoples low in the
social scale reveals traces of the aesthetic experience, and such data have
been used to throw light on the more highly developed forms of aesthetic
consciousness and to indicate its function in the life of the individual and of
society. Such books as Grosse's Beginnings of Art (1893), Groos's Play
of Animals (1896) and Play of Man (1898), Bucher's Arbeit und Rhythmus
(1896; second, revised edition, 1902), Hirn's Origins of Art (1900), and
Gummere's Beginnings of Poetry (1901) have essayed to place the aesthetic
with reference to the whole stream of man's social, occupational, intellectual
development ; and have brought to bear upon the subject a mass of biologic,

« Principles of Psychology (1872); Essays (1852).

» 1877.

3 Op. cii. (1859) ; Mental and Moral Science, chap, xiii (1868).

4 Especially, Sensation and Intuition (1874).
s Aesthetische Forschungen (1855).

6 Vorschule der Aesthetik (1876).

7 GrundzUge der Aesthetik (1884); Microcosmos (1856-64).

,26 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

psychologic, and anthropologic material, highly suggestive, if still some-
what unorganized. Outgrowths of these various movements of modem
thought are to be found in certain prevalent aesthetic theories: Spencer's
"play theory," given a striking new biological adaptation and reinforcement
by Groos; the "inner imitation," Einjiihlung theories — all broadly alike —
of Groos, Theodore Lipps, and Vernon Lee; Lange's "conscious self-
illusion" theory; and Baldwin's "self-exhibition" theory.

Such a survey makes evident that for the last fifty years the dominant
tendency has been to treat aesthetics as a branch of psychology rather than

' of philosophy,/ to consider detached empirical phenomena, but to steer
clear of the attempt to give them a philosophical grounding. Of late, how-
ever, there is a decided movement in the direction of referring the aesthetic
to a place in the course of concrete race-experience, thus giving it a
definitely social character. This movement, though as yet only tentative,
suggests the possibility of giving some sort of coherence under the guidance
of an explicit method to a mass of rich but scattered material. Systema-

[ tization of this sort runs the danger, it is true, of substituting a cheap and

\ easy agreement for honest irreconcilabilities; but to apply such a method to
such material must result in some testing and winnowing of both. More-
over, the conclusions of functional psychology lead with coercive logic to a

,| definite philosophic position — call it "dynamic idealism," "pragmatism,"
' j "humanism," what you will; it is not yet ripe for a definitive name — and
[so suggests a philosophic basis for the aesthetic.

V. PRELIMINARY DEFINITIONS

\

■ Hitherto I have not ventured upon definitions. A satisfactory definition,
indeed, is one of the most difiicult achievements of thought. It marks
properly the final stage of an inquiry, the final deposit of full and exhaustive
thinking. At this point, however, some rough, provisional limitation of
terms may guard against later error and may aid in the setting-up of my
working hypothesis. The two words in my title requiring some sort of
explanation are aesthetic and experience. I shall speak first of experience,
since it is a new, albeit a fashionable, word in current philosophical writing,
and its use perhaps needs justification. I employ it in no pecuUarly
technical sense, and yet with a shade more of precision than in its use in
popular speech, which talks much of experience in bulk as well as of various
experiences. The chief merit of the term to my mind, and the reason why
I prefer it to "consciousness," is just the fact that it seems to link our dis-
cussion of the aesthetic to concrete, everyday living, to point out its intimate
A relations to other types of experience. An "experience" must be some-

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 27

thing warm and human; it cannot be a mere pale abstraction without
organic connection with other aspects of living. Furthermore, "experience
is without the subjective connotation rightly or wrongly knit up with the
word 'consciousness.' " It implies a total concrete situation, not invidious
psychological distinctions of subject and object, words regarding which we
sometimes feel a touch of Carlyle's impatience when he described Coleridge
as continually droning about " sum-m-mject " and " om-m-mject." Experi-
ence, again, ranges the aesthetic on the side of immediate awareness of
value, which is one of the aspects of the aesthetic that I wish to emphasize,
in distinction from the subsequent critical judgments that are made upon
the aesthetic moment. I do not wish to be understood, however, to be
drawing any hard and fast hne of demarkation between the judgmental
and the immediate aspects of conscious hfe. All consciousness is valuational
as I have already stated, and in so far judgmental. What I have said
about the distinction between mediate and immediate experience indicates
the broad difference between the two types. Thus far, I have been merely
making explicit the meanings latent in the term as used in daily life. Be-
yond that, I wish to warn against the popular tendency to speak of "experi-
ence" in the lump as of something passive and finished. My use of the
word involves the notion of something continually going on, developing;
an activity, not a state nor an entity, as "consciousness" is sometimes
taken to do.

Aesthetic is a term about which clusters a host of vague and overlapping
meanings. In its derivation signifying merely sense-perception,: and so used
by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, it was first applied by Baumgarten
in the latter part of the eighteenth century to the philosophy of the beautiful.
It is commonly used today as a rather pretentious synonym for "artistic,"
and is applied to objects and to personal standards of taste and criticism.
In philosophy and psychology it appears in such terms as "the aesthetic
judgment," the aesthetic object," "the aesthetic attitude," "aesthetic
feeling and emotion." As I am using it, the term characterizes a certain
type of concrete conscious experience, having a high sense of immediate
and specialized value inhering in a more or less definite object, and possess-
ing a strong and pleasantly colored " f eehng-tone " — if this can be justly
distinguished from the awareness of value already spoken of. It refers to a
special type of consciousness, not to subsequent reflection upon it, and to
the aesthetic object only as the core of this consciousness, not as studied
independently. It is, therefore, both wider and narrower in its range than
is the term "artistic." It applies to experiences far vaguer than those
generally recognized as involving artistic creation and appreciation, though

28 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

they can be identified by the expert as of the same nature. On the other
hand; it does not apply, ;as I use it, to the study of the artistic object apart
from its immediate apprehension in the aesthetic experience, or to any
technical or merely literary formulation of the principles of artistic pro-
cedure or criticism. I shall essay to show the source of such formulations,
but not to discuss them. It leaves "artistic" to cover the object of art as
such and the whole field of practical activities connected with it and critical
judgments made upon it, so far as these are not based upon inquiry into
the nature of the experience itself. These things may be considered in a
general study of aesthetic theory, not in a study of the "aesthetic experience "
proper.

With the ground thus cleared by some narrowing of the terms used,
let us see what point we have reached in our endeavor to place the aesthetic
experience. I have given a sketch of the position taken by functional
psychology as I conceive it, indicating what I mean by mediate and by
immediate experience, and ranging the aesthetic, provisionally at least,
under the immediate type. I have summarized the striking characteristics
of the aesthetic experience as familiar to common observation and as agreed
upon by widely differing schools. I have noted the chaotic state of the
literature of aesthetics, and have tried to put my own use of terms in an
unambiguous light. It now remains to discover how far we can bring our
own introspective analysis and the ordinary theoretical accounts of the
aesthetic experience into agreement with the account of the nature and
movement of experience furnished by functional psychology.

VI. THE "aesthetic MOMENT" IN THE REFLECTIVE PROCESS

For a clue in our inquiry we may turn to the type of mental experience
commonly held to lie at the opposite pole from the aesthetic, namely, the
operation of reflective thought, to what has been called mediate, recon-
structive, as opposed to immediate or constitutive, experience. There are
two reasons for this appeal. First, the reflective or judgment-process
proper has been more thoroughly analyzed by functional psychology
than has any other type of experience; and, second and more important,
it '.functions as the prime agency in the reorganization of experience, and
in so doing falls apart into various stages and aspects, as immediate, organ-
ized experience cannot do, thus revealing the structural elements of which
immediate experience is composed. As I sought to make clear in my first
section, all experience, as we know it — that is, all forms of meaning, con-
trol, knowledge — has been won through the establishment of higher and
higher types of co-ordination; and reflective thought represents only a

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 29

complex kind of co-ordinating process, incorporating into itself innumer-
able minor co-ordinations. Somewhere, then, in the career, the life-history,
of the reflective process we may hope to find a stage that will throw light on
the aesthetic experience, that we may even call "aesthetic," though it be not
commonly recognized as such. If we can identify such a stage in the
falling-apart and rebuilding of experience involved in reflection, it will help
us to solve the problem of how it has come to detach itself, and to stand out
as an independent and unique type of consciousness, as well as the corollary
problem of the effect that it itself has on subsequent experience.

It is not necessary to do more than to repeat the statement that reflective
thought arises only when immediate or smoothly working activity has
been hindered or brought to a standstill through some difficulty in the
carrying-out of an end. The range of this stoppage of action is, of course,
enormously wide, extending from a momentary hesitation in making a trifling
local response to a widespread disturbance that involves the whole organism
and produces prolonged cessation of direct outer control. From the slightest
to the most profound case, however, the disturbance is registered in con-
sciousness as emotional seizure, although, when the arrest is insignificant,
the emotion may be barely at the conscious level. The more important
and more widely connected are the organic activities involved, the keener is
the awareness of emotional agitation. In fact, the two are but different
ways of stating the same experience, as Professor James has shown. Un-
pleasantly toned emotion is but the conscious aspect of pent-up organic
activities, thwarting instead of reinforcing one another. This leads to the
diffusion of feeling-states, so often pointed out. Emotion is always a sign
of partial inhibition, of some sort of arrest of activities that normally
complete themselves in intelligent behavior.

After the first clash of impulses, and the resultant sense of uneasiness
and distress, comes the demand for reconstruction and renewed control,
leading at once, if the obstacle be not prohibitive, to the attempt to take
stock of the disturbed situation, to sort out the warring elements, and to
work them over into some kind of agreement. If this process proceed
with any degree of success, the attention fastens upon first one aspect of
the situation, then another, and reshapes or eliminates them in the effort
to meet the new demand. As this critical revision continues, the area of
emotional disturbance narrows and its acuteness diminishes, while with the
advance toward mastery emerges a feeling of satisfaction that increases
as the area of adjustment widens, and culminates at the moment when things
are working together again, and the situation is once more ready to com-
plete and transcend itself in action. The dawning of this sense of satisfac-

30 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

tion is accordingly a signal that reconstruction is approaching the stage
when it becomes again possible to act. Its intensity is commensurate with
the degree and extent of the initial disturbance, and with the difficulty or
ease of the intermediate stages of reorganization.

Here, then, within the history of the reflective process, we find a stage

that has points in common with our preliminary description of the aesthetic.

It appears toward the close of intellectual reconstruction, is a sign that the

v\ reconstruction is complete, or at least sufficiently advanced for service as a

guide to outward action, and is of a pleasant emotional tone. Without

this testimony on the part of consciousness, it is difficult to see what would

- 1 be the determining point for the cessation of reflection. It is certainly

'^ always a " f eeUng-tone " of some sort that marks oflf one type of experience

; from another, that gives each its individuality and value. \This "aesthetic

moment " at the close of every specific operation of reflective thought char-

; acterizes the moment when, as Professor Royce puts it, "we pause satisfied."

1 This "pause of satisfaction "* means that for the moment we exhaust the

1 situation, feel its full significance; it tells us also that our means and ovir

I ends, hitherto at odds, have become once more consolidated ; that the breach

i in experience is healed ; and that conduct may go on, modified and enriched

I through the intervention of thought./

It is aside from my purpose to dwell upon the various stages and forms
in the thought-process. To trace them is the business of the student of
logic and of the psychology of reflective thinking. But it is important to
repeat that the pause of satisfaction does not arise altogether suddenly.
Throughout the course of reconstruction minor reconciliations are con-
tinually effected, as the inventory and manipulation of the content of con-
sciousness proceed; and these herald the final moment of co-operation and
restoration among all the forces involved. It is essential to recognize that
. the reconstruction throughout is organic, not mechanical; that the elements
are in vital relation to one another and to the whole. Change in one involves
change in all and in the determination of the result or end. But so long as
the process is incomplete, the minor satisfactions are local and more or
less modified by the still existing restriction and confusion ; the general
satisfaction is vague and uncertain. There are alternations or waves of
satisfaction and dissatisfaction. It Is not unfair to say that the process is
rhythmical, made up at first of a number of minor and conflicting rhythms,
which become gradually incorporated into a larger major rhythm. The

I World and Individual, Vol. I, p. 330.

» Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory, XI, " Some Logical Aspects of Purpose"
(A. W. Moore), pp. 361-63.

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 31

experimental studies of rhythm point out the way in which a larger rhythm
arises out of simpler rhythms, laking them up into itself and binding them
together into a unitary whole, to the rich individuality of which the com-
ponents make subsidiary but distinctive contribution. The first appear-
ance of this larger rhythm foreshadow:? the ultimate pause of satisfaction.
Developing itself, it guides and shapes the varying activities within its
grasp, so that these irregular movements take on more and more the char-
acter of alternations of expectancy and fulfilment, becoming gradually
harmonized in the fully satiofactory experience. Robert MacDougall, in
his exhaustive study of the rhythmic experience, shows that a rhythm thus
develops instead of merely maintaining itself. It is not a bare reiteration,
but a growth, in which each phase anticipates the next and is modified by
those preceding. * ' Conclusive evidence of the integration of simple rhythm
forms in higher structures is presented by the process of increasing defini-
tion which every rhythmical sequence manifests between its inception and
its close." There is "progres?ive co-ordination.'"' R. H. Stetson,* in a
study of more elaborate rhythm forms, says that

the essential character of musical rhythm, as contrasted with the rhythm both of
simple sounds and of verse, is just this co-ordination of a number of rhythms which

move side by side It is evident in cases of expressional variations of

tempo that a single broad rhythm is dominating and serving as a cue for the
other more elaborate rhythmic processes, instead of being regxxlated by them.

In the world of objective art-forms the modern symphony most adequately
illustrates this process of progressive organization of complex material. It
cai ries us forward on waves of musical tension and resolution that are kept
from being painful only by our sense that each contributes to the unfolding
of a definite whole, which dominates every phase of development, however
novel it may seem in itself. Each intermediary resolution embraces what
has gone before and prophesies the final and complete fulfilment, through
its own partial inadequacy, so that this fulfilment comes, not as surprise,
but rather as culmination and reconciliation. Although we cannot find
objective parallels for every aesthetic process, as we can do in the case of
modern music, it seems to me that the phenomena of rhythm and the facts of
musical construction in general furnish the most fruitful modes of conceiving
all forms of aesthetic experience. Functional psychology recogni.^es that
the various types of experience represent complex processes, and that each

I "The Structure of Simple Rhythm Forms," Psychological Review, Monograph.
Supplements, Vol. IV (Whole No. 17), p. 389.
a Ibid., pp. 465, 466.

32 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

type has its distinctive "pattern." The pattern of integrated rhythm-
forms seems most applicable to the aesthetic experience.

To say that the aesthetic assumes the "rhythmic pattern" is only to
assert that it represents the simultaneous rather than the serial type of
organization; that it carries abreast a number of activities, becoming
progressively integrated and resulting in an equilibrium of tensions. The
"pause of satisfaction," accordingly, is but the formulation in terms of
emotion, of value, of what I have already called, in terms of structure or
content, "the aesthetic image." This co-ordination and interaction of
coexisting activities accounts both for its emotional character and for the
[fact that it is^a "pause," a unique experience, recognized as such and not
j discharging at once into outward action. It is a reservoir of attained
j values, a "saturation" of all its different constituents. It is too rich in
manifold possibilities of further movement to overflow at once into any
one channel. > It may be compared to the f eeUng one has in looking from a
mountain-top over a wide prospect, with hill and valley, lakes, streams,
roads, and paths spread out before one. There are so many ways to descend
that one luxuriates in the fulness of opportunity. And it is this very
exhilaration, this broadening and heightening of one's sense of capacity,
that incites to the perilous scramble down the rocks rather than to
retracing one's steps by the well-blazed trail. In other words, the pause
of satisfaction is not altogether without forward reference, not wholly
inclosed. If it were, it would be difficult to find its point of attachment
to the rest of the experiential series. But it is only indirectly, as the tide
of satisfaction surges back over the organism and acts itself as a new
stimulus, that it reinforces some one or other of the co-operating habits
or groups of habits to the point where it breaks free from the temporary
aesthetic co-ordination, and proceeds to function independently, thus
bringing about a resumption of ordinary action. The significance of the
aesthetic experience as stimulus is often overlooked in the effort to explain
what it is in itself. But it cannot be ignored in any attempt to relate the
aesthetic to the problems of the growth and control of experience.

It must, furthermore, be kept in' mind that the distinction between the
serial and the simultaneous types of organization is not rigid. Every pro-
cess involving a succession of stages is of necessity serial; on the other
hand, all forms of reconstruction involve the interplay and co-ordination
of activities. The difference between the two tj^es — the practical, in the
large sense of the solution of problems, whether purely intellectual, ethical,
economic, or material — and the aesthetic is rather a matter of different
relations of means and ends. In the one case they are brought together

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 33

only with difficulty, by means of search, selection, and rejection. Much is
eliminated after serving its immediate purpose as means; there is a sense
of irksomeness and difficulty up to the last step in the process, and the final
solution is likely to be marked more by a sense of relief at its termination
than by any positive satisfaction. The image is what we have described as
a working image, and serves promptly as a cue to action. Such a process
is obviously serial, and the aesthetic moment at its conclusion is at its
minimum, though necessarily present, and is commonly unrecognized as
such. In the other case means and end develop together, and the end
attains full value and significance through its absorption and incorporation
of a rich and varied supply of means. From the beginning there is an
anticipatory survey of available resources that must be carried forward
together in delicate balance. There is movement here, too, modification
and revision; but the values won at different stages are embodied in the
result, are become necessary constituents and ingredients of the whole,
maintaining themselves in active equilibrium. The attainment of this con-
sohdation and harmonization is attended by a widely diffused feeling of
satisfaction. The image at the end of the process is what has been called
the "aesthetic image," and the general movement has been of the simul-
taneous order. Whether such an experience is definitely characterized as
aesthetic depends on the range of activities involved, the depth and width
of the "pause of satisfaction." If it suffuses consciousness and absorbs
attention, it has every right to be called aesthetic in the accepted sense of
the term, and to be looked upon as a distinctive experience, set off from
the processes leading to it.

From this survey of the process of reflective thought, we find, then,
that a phase which may be called aesthetic in character arises as the
culminating stage of such an operation, and is a mark of successful recon-
struction. In other words, it shows that the habits or activities whose
interference led to the necessity of readjustment have been so reorganized
that they now support instead of checking one another. Moreover, the
intensity and duration of this phase are seen to depend upon the number
of co-operating activities involved and the intimacy of their co-operation.

This view has few claims to originality, and entirely fails to answer
certain questions raised earlier in the discussion. But it is not inconsistent
with many of the recent accounts of the aesthetic experience. It may be
of value at this point to compare it with some of the better-known modem
formulations of the aesthetic. /Grant Allen, following Spencer, defines
the aesthetically beautiful as "that which affords the Maximum of Stimu-
lation with the Minimum of Fatigue or Waste, in processes not directly

34 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

connected with vital function."^ Passing by the limitation in the last
phrase, which indicates a failure to discriminate between the physiological
and the psychological, we may most naturally interpret the definition as
equivalent to my statement in terms of a large number of simultaneously
co-operating activities. It says nothing, however, regarding the conditions
under which such stimulation arises. Guyau declares that the aesthetic
is a "simple matter of degree," and that aesthetic enjoyment is found
wherever we have in consciousness a pleasure with the maximum of exten-
sion compatible with the maximum of intention.* This is quite in the
quantitative manner of Grant Allen, although Guyau substitutes pleasure
for stimulation, and thus emphasizes the emotional rather than the activity
\/ side of the experience. "Aesthetic emotion," he goes on to say, "seems

thus to consist essentially in an enlargement, a sort of resonance of sensation
throughout our whole being, especially through our intelligence and our
wilk It is an accord, a harmony, among our sensations, our thoughts
and o\ir sentiments. "^ These statements are on the descriptive and not on
the explanatory level, but they reiterate in a striking fashion the character-
istics that we have pointed out in the "pause of satisfaction." Guyau
lays special stress on the fact that the aesthetic experience is a unification
of many factors, a "harmony" of our natures.

Other writers dwell on the emotional heightening in the aesthetic experi-
ence. Theodore Lipps calls it the psychische Gesamterregung, die all-
gemein-" Stimmtmg" der Ajfekt;^ and Hirn points out that a heightened
sense of vitaUty, a marked degree of emotional excitation, is one of the
primary characteristics of the aesthetic consciousness. 5 Professor Kate
Gordon in a recent thesis defines beauty as "that which unexpectedly
offers a secondary or auxihary stimulus to any act;" and says further:

I should say that the facility of the adjustment would be the criterion of an
aesthetic situation; if the old habit were soon found — i. e., struck into by a short-
cut and followed down without resistance — the experience would Ijc aesthetic;
but if there were a long delay, and the two opposing lines of excitation were
obliged to worry out a new path, then the experience would be merely practical.
The aesthetic consciousness in the former case would depend on the nimiber and
the depth of such by-paths.^

I Op. cit., p. 39.
r! a Les prohlhmes de I'esthitique contemporaine, pp. 72, 73.

3 Ibid.

4 "Von der Form der aesthetischen Apperception," Philosophische Abhand-
lungen (Halle, 1902), p. 387.

5 The Origins of Art, pp. 70, 71, 82-85.

6 The Psychology of Meaning, p. 10.

THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 35

Although Dr. Gordon's statement is couched in terms of physiology rather
than of psychology, her distinction between the aesthetic and the practical —
the degree of ease in making the adjustment — would seem to correspond
to my distinction between the serial and simultaneous types of operation;
and she also makes the intensity of the experience depend on the number
and pattern of its constituents. Her analysis is in the interest of a general
study of meaning or value, and her characterization of beauty as that which
unexpectedly offers a secondary stimulus evidently has reference to the
indirect, resurgent effect of the aesthetic experience, acting as stimulus to
further conduct of a different type. Dr. Ethel Puffer, whose study of the
Psychology of Beauty has appeared since this essay was first written, gives an
account of the aesthetic that in many ways parallels mine, although with
considerable diversity of purpose and emphasis. She defines the aesthetic
feeling as a combination of favorable stimulation and repose: •

The only aesthetic repose is that in which stimulation resulting in impulse to
movement or action is checked or compensated for by its antagonistic impulse;
inhibition of action, or action returning upon itself, combined with heightening
of tone. But this is tension, equilibrium, or balance of forces, which is thus seen
to be a general condition of all aesthetic experience.^

Santayana says in his last volume, Reason in Art:

An aesthetic sanction sweetens all successful living .... An aesthetic glow
may pervade experience, but that circumstance is seldom remarked; it figures
only as an influence working subterraneously on thoughts and judgments which
in themselves take a cognitive or practical direction. Only when the aesthetic
ingredient becomes predominant do we exclaim, "How beautiful!"*

In these statements I find support for my contention that the aesthetic means
successful functioning, and marks the completion of every activity, though
in ordinar)' non-aesthetic e.xperience it is not recognized as such, and reveals
itself only to deliberate analysis.

My account of the\aesthetic experience is then, for the present at least, /
that it always involves a cluster of activities, functioning together with I
mutual reinforcement, an "equilibrium of tensions." ' This is, howeverf^
hardly more than a descriptive statement. We have still to inquire more
fully how the independent experience arises, maintains itself, and disappears.
Moreover, the placing of the aesthetic moment at the end of the reflective
process seems to make it the outcome of anterior conflict and inhibitions.
In the most conspicuous instances of our individual aesthetic experiences
this precedent disturbance is apparently strikingly absent. How are we to

' P. 50.

' Pp. 188, 193, 194.

36 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

reconcile the two views ? Following the lead of current thinking on other
types of experience, we may throw light on these questions, and others that
we have asked, by seeking to place the aesthetic in the life-history of the
race and with regard to certain general considerations of social psychology.

PART II
THE SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
I. TYPICAL AESTHETIC PERIODS IN THE HISTORY OF THE RACE

In the historic series, so far as it has been reconstructed for us with any
degree of fulness, there are two periods of pre-eminent interest for the
student of the aesthetic experience. These are the period of the fifth and
fourth centuries b. c. in Greece, and the Renaissance period of the fourteenth,
fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries in Europe, particularly in Italy. Lesser
periods are those of the florescence of early Christian art, of French
classicism, and of the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. Special movements worthy of note are the rise
and development of the modern novel and of modern music. An art that
we are just beginning to know, and that throws valuable light on the whole
aesthetic problem through its very detachment from our standards and
associations, is the art of the Japanese.

The flowering time of Greece and the Renaissance are periods often com-
pared. They possess, indeed, striking points of likeness, different as were
their temper and their artistic products. Both are late chapters in the long,
obsciure story of man's social career and relatively late in the specific phases
of development to which they belong. Both are preceded by ages of limita-
tion, of material and intellectual poverty, and, more immediately, by times
of disorder and confusion. The parallel between Europe and Greece is
thus drawn in a recent history of modern Europe:

The history of modem Europe presents, in fact, as much unity as that of
Greece in early times. Composed of a cluster of independent states, of which
one, now Athens, now Sparta, now Thebes, aspired to the hegemony, her only
rallying cry was against the barbarians, as that of Christendom was against the
infidels, whilst her chief bond of union was also a religious one, manifested in the
Amphictyonic Council and the games at Olympia and elsewhere, which bear
some analogy to the General Councils and the festivals of the Roman Church.'

Turning to the history of Greece, we find that its details are obscure
before the age of the Tyrants in the late seventh and the sixth centuries.
The shiftings of population, first in the so-called Dorian migrations and later
in the colonization movement, is the aspect that stands out most conspicu-
ously. But the Homeric poems and other early Uteratures bring before us
with remarkable fulness the social and political standards and ideals of the
I Dyer and Hassall, History of Modern Europe, p. 3.

37

38 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Greeks of the pre-migration and migration periods. Moreover, the researches
of archaeology and of comparative anthropology are constantly pushing
back the boundary lines of the historic, and affording us glimpses down
long vistas of the prehistoric past. Such glimpses of Greece show us
small, hardy village-communities, involved more or less continually in local
raids and quarrels, and wringing a scanty livelihood from the soil or from
the hazards of a half-piratical sea-faring life. Their social life was still a
matter of group-maintenance, controlled by custom, specific and traditional;
their religion was still a bundle of savage primitive survivals, pointing to
times of yet ruder organization.* But the diversities of Greek topography,
both seaboard and inland, had brought about diversity of occupations;
and these varied occupations were sufficiently precarious to develop a vigor
and keen-wittedness able and eager to cope with larger problems. Long
before the dawn of authentic history the Greeks had lifted themselves
above the level of struggle for mere subsistence; but the margin won was
too shifting to be secure without skilful manipulation of man and of nature.
Hence a constant sharpening of intelligence, a disposition to rely on men
rather than on things, a widening of the range of problems grappled with
and of control secured. This widening of range is shown by the accounts
of the wars and leagues of early post-Homeric days; by the expansion of
commerce and the extensive planting of colonies in both the eastern and the
western Mediterranean; by the development of the "village-community"
into the "city-state," and the accompanying poUtical struggles and reforms.
Such a bewildering accumulation of new occupations and interests, such a
reaching-out toward varied ends as yet imperfectly understood and con-
trolled, led inevitably to widespread conflict of issues and to resultant con-
fusion. Thus in Athens the growth of trade brought about collisions
between the newly rich merchant class and the old landholders ; intensified
the economic distress of the peasants, and drove them to make common
cause with the commercial and industrial classes.^ Clever political leaders,
seizing some advantage of birth or wealth, played off one class against
another, and established tyrannies that gave temporary stability. But the
forces working throughout the state were too powerful to remain long in
any sort of externally imposed and premature union. The tyrants in many
cases, it is true, contributed to the accumulaton of both material and intel-
lectual resources; they stored up means and supplies. But that was only
constructing a new center of conflict around which the other forces swirled
and eddied. A general stirring and heightening of emotional and intellec-

' Cf. A. Lang, Myth Ritual and Religion, Vol. I, chap. 9; Vol. II, chap. 17.

» Cf. W. Cunningham, Western Civilization in Its Economic Aspects, Vol. I,
pp. 99-102.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 39

tual life accompanied the rapid changes in economic, social, and political
affairs. The body-politic was small enough for all citizens to meet for dis-
cussion in the market-place; everyone shouldered some civic responsibility;
sailors and merchants told of adventurous voyages to every coast of the
Mediterranean, and of the "manners, climates, councils, governments"
there encountered; returned colonists from Ionia or Magna Graecia
boasted, no doubt, of the superior opportunities of their new homes, and
thus led the stay-at-homes to marshal their own advantages. It was a
world whose dominant mental attitude is reflected in Herodotus — curious,
restless, shrewd, yet credulous. The air was charged with new and varied
interests and expectations, but men were still dazzled and a little amazed by
the many prospects opening before them. They felt a sense of youthful
exhilaration rather than of achievement or secure possession, of power
rather than of control. They had not yet actually put themselves to the test.

In certain important fields, however, they had already won solid results.
The problem of government, involving the transformation of the village-
community, dependent on common food-supply, blood-kinship, and local
worship, into the city-state, had been practically worked out. Democratic
government had arisen to hold the fluctuating elements within the city-state
in some sort of working equilibrium; the scattered religious cults, though
not superseded, had been embraced within the general worship of the pan-
Hellenic Olympian deities, and were being purged of their worst crudities;
race-con§ciousness had been deepened by common festivals and by inter-
course with the "barbarians." What was needed was the welding together,
the generalization and synthesizing, of all these elements in Greek life.

This was effected through the supreme test of the Persian wars. The
whole of Greek life and civilization was at stake. It was a tremendous
emotional crisis, in which the exultation of victory followed hard upon
the realization of peril. Such a transition from the darkest apprehension
to the fulness of success is hardly to be found elsewhere in history save at
the time of the Spanish Armada. That it did not plunge the Greeks, and
particularly the Athenians, into mere vainglorious boasting is chiefly due
to the conditions under which they had already made their gains in civiliza-
tion. Shut, although not imprisoned, within their little states; unused to
great wealth or bitter poverty; made fertile in expedient, yet steadfast in
the face of danger through the vicissitudes of a seafaring life; trained to
self-reliance and watchfulness through their form of government as well as
through their occupations, they had reached a degree of poise that enabled
them to meet with surprising equanimity both the suspense and the triumph
of the Persian wars. Much has been written to account for the origin of the

40 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Greek conception of law as moderation — the principle of nothing in excess.
The growth of the notion may be traced in many fields, but in general it is
enough to indicate that it is the formulation of what the Greeks met at every
turn in their practical active experience. It was this same poise, these same
habits of moderation in thought and action, that shielded them from the
effects of contact with Asiatic despotism and luxury. Though these things
may have kindled imagination and added to wealth, they were so indissolubly
associated with the "barbarians," so alien to the traditions and ideals of
Hellas, that they were looked upon with contempt. It was not by store
of things, nor by power based on the treating of men as things, that the
Greeks had conquered. It was the contrast in all respects between the
Greeks and the Persians — in numbers, in wealth, in political organiza-
tion, in physical prowess, in intelligence — that gave such exquisite point
to Athenian pride, that led the Athenians to discriminate the qualities in
Greek civilization at the same time that it heightened their sense of its value.

And this glow of pride, this sense of great achievement based, not on
material strength, but on human character, which filled the soul of every
free-born citizen of Athens, was felt most intensely by the great artists of
the time, and found most complete embodiment in the plays of Aeschylus
and Sophocles, in the sculptures of the Parthenon. These, in their turn,
defined and reinforced the feeling in the minds of the beholders. Such
works of art both heighten and relieve emotion — heighten by focusing on
a particular object, and relieve by giving order and coherence to what
otherwise remains vague and diffused. Greek art is fundamentally "Art
the Reliever."* Nowhere do we feel so much the force of Aristotle's
aesthetic principle of "katharsis." It clarifies and steadies emotion by
centering it upon objects that possess pre-eminently the rhythmic poise and
balance of the Greek mind. Such an art uplifts rather than excites. It
ennobles and assuages.

In the highest development of Greek art, then, of Greek aesthetic experi-
ence— to put it into terms of the situation in which the work of art has
its birth and its effect — we find the coalescence, or at least the intimate
co-operation, of a large number of activities and interests that had been
developed through a long period of precedent effort, had been worked out
as separate ends and used as means in various piursuits. These interests,
dispositions, customs, attitudes, call them what you will, instead of exist-
ing in isolation, or in partial and often antagonistic combination, have
become mutually supporting, interwoven, and so changed in the process that
they are lost sight of as independent elements and persist only as contrib-
» Cf. Him, op. cit., pp. 70, 71.

/

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 4I

utory forces, giving to the whole its unique power of stimulation and tran-
quilization. To say this is to say that they are in emotional solution, and
yet brought together around that concrete core that we call the imaged or
actualized aesthetic object.

European life before and during the Renaissance goes through much the
same stages that Athenian life went through, though on a larger scale and
with a far greater array of jostling forces. It is peculiarly dij6&cult to
simimarize a period in one sense so transitional, in another so full and so
unique in character. One is in danger of being either dogmatic or vague,
and is likely to end by being both.

The Middle Ages have been redeemed from the sweeping charges of
sterility and limitation that used to be brought against them. Our deep-
ened sense of the continuity of experience has taught us that we cannot ban
any age at wholesale. Whatever its total of accomplishment, it has within
it all the essential manifestations of human experience and intelligence.
But, looked at in the large, the downfall of the Roman Empire at the hands
of a rude but vigorous people at a far lower level of culture brought about
a time of turbulence and confusion in which the Roman ideas of system,
law, and authority, surviving the wreckage of the actual machinery of govern-
ment, contended with the Germanic idea of local group-independence and
blood-loyalty. Kuno Franke says of the era of migration:

The first appearance of Germanic tribes in the foreground of European his-
tory, the influx of the northern barbarians into the decaying civilization of the
Roman Empire, is marked by a dissolution of all social bonds. Severed from
their native soil, thrust into a world in which their ancestral faith, customs, insti-
tutions have no authority, the Teutons of the era of the migrations experience for
the first time on a grand scale the conflict between universal law and individual
passion. ^

But, as he points out, this conflict was not altogether destructive. Out of it
emerged the two great institutions of the Middle Ages — feudalism, culmin-
ating in the mediaeval empire, and the mediaeval church. These two
furnished an all-embracing, if highly formal, scheme of organization, and
held in check the centrifugal forces of the times. But necessary as we see
them to have been as initial movements in the ultimate efficient co-operation
of these forces they imposed an artificial and schematic unity that failed to
allow for many aspects of life. As movement from place to place was for
the bulk of the people impossible under feudalism, so was intellectual
activity circumscribed by the system which fostered it. Possible only in
detachment from the stress of practical life, it flourished in the shelter of
» Social Forces in German Literature, p. 3.

42 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

the church ; and there, cut off from vital human problems, tended to become
rigid and formalized, spending itself on the effort to rationalize dogmas that
had been inherited, often in perverted form, from another civilization.
If it sought to deal at first hand with life, it came into collision with the sys-
tem that supported it. It was only the exceptional man that threw off even
partially the yoke of fixed universals, rigid preconceptions that governed
in different forms the life of scholarship, of war, and of trade. Yet in all
these departments of life tools were forging and sharpening, force was
disciplining and growing eager to try its metal. Actual life was bursting
the bonds of formula. And with the growth of the quarrel between the
papacy and the empire, tending to the discrediting of both artificial systems ;
with the vitalizing influence of the Crusades in their weakening of feudalism
and their tremendous impetus both to commerce and to learning; with the
organization of the industrial class, and the emergence of the modern
languages and the modern national governments, came a loosening of bonds,
an upsetting of old ideas, an awakening to new interests and to new and
individual standards unparalleled in the history of the race. All these
elements, seething together in a sort of ferment, must have produced in the
minds of men a wonderful sense of liberation, coupled with bewilderment
and uncertainty regarding the use of this newly won freedom. Such a state
of mind was of necessity surcharged with emotion. Either without definite
outlet, or discharging itself in hasty, ill-considered, and abortive conduct,
this emotional consciousness was often painful in character, and created
new complications and new emotional crises.

Even to read over the general accounts of the Renaissance, such as those
of Symonds and Burckhardt, or the more sober pages of the Cambridge
Modern History volume on the period, is to be impressed by the intricacy
and confusion, but also by the richness, of its interests — its multitudinous
stimulations to new and daring modes of feeling, thought, and conduct.
It was a whirling world, many aspects of which were still wavering and
fantastic, and others in paradoxical contrast, (it requires a stretch of the
modern imagination to picture the highly keyed and highly colored life in
an Italian city of the Renaissance. On its dynastic side, it is a life of intrigue
and counter-intrigue, of unexpected and horrible forms of violence.
Symonds paints us a liu-id portrait of the successful despot, "a gladiator
of tried capacity and iron nerve, superior to religious and moral scruples,
dead to natural affection, perfected in perfidy, scientific in the use of cruelty
and terror, employing first-rate faculties of brain and bodily powers in the
service of transcendent egotism."^ It is a life punctuated by fierce sieges,

I Age of the Despots (ed. 1888), p. 1 18.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 43

by famines, plagues, wholesale or secret murders. But it is also a life of
great industrial and commercial activity, of successful war and diplomacy,
of civic enrichment and adornment. Campaigns, splendid festivals, high
enthusiasms over newly discovered treasures of classic art and literature,
over "the things of the mind" now first deemed worthy for their own sake,
exquisite skill in fashioning objects of daily use and enjoyment — all these
things are an integral part of existence in cities like Florence and Venice in
the climax of their career. Life within them was buoyant and animated,
full and many-colored, with a touch of youthful recklessness in its pulsating
vigor, and at times a strain of wistfulness, as of too much to experience and
to enjoy.

And at the time of the Renaissance, as in Greece during her brief days
of greatness, the kaleidoscopic content of experience was caught and given
coherence and emphasis through a supreme art, in which heterogeneous
and incongruous elements were blended and harmonized into an emo-
tional unity that is poignant in its intensity. What influence this art had
upon the men who were its contemporaries we can judge only imperfectly
from its effect upon ourselves. But that it revealed them to themselves
in some fashion we cannot doubt, intensifying their consciousness of the
life they were leading, making them feel, as nothing except art can do
directly, the life-communicating and life-enhancing power of the events
and objects of their experience. Browning gets at this effect of art in his
well-knowi^ lines:

We're made so that we love
^ [ First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.

Renaissance art is more stimulating and less reposeful than Greek art.
It is Art the Enhancer rather than Art the Reliever. But it too reUeves,
in so far as it eliminates disturbing and distracting elements and concen-
trates attention.

We find, accordingly, in both Greece and Italy, at the dawn of their
periods of greatest artistic productiveness, a throng of activities and inter-
ests more or less at variance, but not actually excluding one another, and
operating on a basis of general economic, social and political organization.
The margin thus gained has led to a multiplication of minor conflicts and
interferences, but the problems are no longer those of bare maintenance,
of struggle to avoid elimination through the harshness of physical nature
or at the hands of domestic factions or of external foes. The problems
are rather those resulting from an embarrassment of riches, from more

44 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

stimulations to action, more new fields to open up than can be clearly
grasped or adequately managed. Hence the pressing necessity of some
unifying and interpretative statement, and the appearance of this state-
ment in the aesthetic consciousness and in the work of art.

Of the other periods that I have instanced space forbids me to say
more than a few words. If studied with care, they all reveal the fact that
they involve to a greater or less degree an immediate emotional conscious-
ness of the interrelation of a variety of activities.

The rise of early Christian art follows the impact and interaction of
two views of life — the Graeco-Roman, and the Hebraic with its strong
oriental coloring. Christian art is an imperfect attempt to harmonize
these two views, both so rich in values and in many respects so unlike.
Whether the chief stimulus to this art came through Rome, as has been the
classic view, or directly through the Hellenized Orient, as is maintained
today, does not alter our recognition of the complex nature of the
constituent elements.^

The French classicism of the seventeenth century stands for the inclos-
ing of the fantastic aspirations of the Middle Ages and the youthful exu-
berance of the Renaissance within the strait-jacket of a spurious classicism
and a political despotism. It is a movement within narrow limits and
guided by artificial formulas, but it possessed an emotional significance
for its participants that it does not possess for us, and we are likely to
overlook the range of its contributory influences.*

The romantic movement, on the other hand, from whichever of its
many sides we approach it, shows in all its products traces of the multiple
activities that went to its compounding. Within it play many of the
forces that we call distinctively modem. The sharp setting-over of the
individual against society, and the glorification of his rights, passions,
and aspirations; the emergence of a deep emotional and even sentimental
enthusiasm for external nature as sharing and reflecting the moods of
"natural man;" the dreams of a regenerated social order appear aUke in
the profound political, social, and moral upheavals and readjustments
of the times and in the great philosophical systems and great literary
masterpieces which it produced. The series of historic events and the
series of artistic and intellectual constructions are not merely parallel; it
is their vital correlation that we see in such men as Goethe and Kant,
Wordsworth and Shelley, with their absorption in man's largest social
welfare as well as in his artistic, intellectual, and moral freedom. The

I Cf. Josef Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom.
- ( « Cf . Arvfede Barine, La Grande Mademoiselle.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 4$

period of the Romantic movement is the most intense of the periods we
have surveyed. Its interests and activities are perhaps not so wide in
range as those of the Renaissance, but they cut deeper, and so admit of less
complete resolution and absorption in the aesthetic consciousness. The
Romantic work of art heightens emotion and the sense of active life to a
high degree. It stimulates and Uberates; it never fully harmonizes and
tranquilizes. It is partly on this account that it takes the forms of litera-
ture and music rather than of painting or sculpture. It is dynamic, full
of the stress and strain, the alternations of suspense and relief, that char-
acterize human passion and action. And, because of its vehemence, it
falls just short of the most perfect art, since it overstimulates, and thus
produces fatigue and a restless sense of lurking discord and division.

As special manifestations of the aesthetic consciousness in modem
times we cannot afford to overlook entirely the development of the modern
novel and of modem music. The novel shows the modern individual,
restless, many-sided, inquiring, interested in himself and in his own
experiences, whether outer or inner; eager to frame his own generaliza-
tions, not to accept them from any sort of authority. A lively curiosity re-
garding the details of personal life and experience animates books like
Pepys' Diary and Boswell's Life of Johnson, as well as the Tatler and the
Spectator and the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Jane Austen. The
Romantic movement proper changed the current of fiction for Scott, but we
still have the wide range, the loose organization, the irregular shift and play
of incident and character, that demand the novel rather than the drama
as their vehicle. With later nineteenth-century fiction broader social and
humanitarian interests enter in on the one side, and a more acute and
dynamic psychology on the other; but they both serve as means of throwing
into relief the essentials of individual human character and conduct in all
their manifold variations.

Of modern music limitations of knowledge even more than of space
forbid my speaking. But its late appearance shows in what a complex
situation it takes its rise. Its rich variety, its depth and scope of emotional
appeal, its intricacies of harmony and rhythm, all fit it to be, as it is often
called, the characteristic art of modern life. At all events it is today the
most vigorous of the arts. And the way in which modern music is con-
stantly pressing into its service tonal combinations that were not so long
ago felt to be distinctly unmusical is the most conspicuous example before
us of the way in which a non-aesthetic element may be worked over and
ultimately become contributory to a new and richer type of aesthetic
experience. As the symphonies of Beethoven and Schumann interpreted

46 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

with majestic sweep and breadth the yearnings of a divided Germany reach-
ing out toward national life, so the splendid and turbulent music-dramas of
Wagner, and even the audacious "tone-poems" of Richard Strauss, are
helping us to interpret the bewildering complexities of the life we are trying
to live.

In all the periods mentioned, jdiflferent as they were in content and
sketchily as I have characterized them, there is the same essential situation —
a wide basis of social organization and achievement, and an array of less
stable interests and activities, overlapping and colliding to a considerable
extent, but sufficiently in hand to admit of further correlation and unifica-
cation. The immediate realization of this possible unification is represented
objectively by the work of art, psychologically by the emotional creative
experience of the artist which, embodied in his work, completes and syn-
thesizes the like emotional experience in the minds of his public. In the
world of objective social values as in the world of mental construction —
though each is an abstraction without the other — the aesthetic marks the
culminating moment in a process of elaborate reorganization.

To what, we must furthermore ask of history, led the great periods
of artistic production that we have been canvassing ? Since experience is
never static, what modifications in national life were brought about by such
times of artistic triumph? At first sight, history returns a disheartening
reply. The Peloponnesian wars and the disintegration of Greek life fol-
lowed close upon its time of greatest artistic vigor. In Italy the splendors
of Renaissance art died quickly away before the exploitation of the country
by France and Spain, and the rigors of the Counter-Reformation. It is
easy to be misled by this surface view. The aesthetic experience in the race
or the individual does not lead necessarily to specified types of conduct.
Fiurthermore, the work of art is only one influence in any period. To say
that a period is one of high aesthetic feeling and artistic production is to
say that it cannot last. It represents the summing-up and binding-
together of many forces; it is a time of survey and fulfilment. And the
awareness of such fulfilment itself brings the experience to an end. The
heightened feeling-tone, the sense of enlarged vitality, flow back over the
experience as a whole, and affect in different degrees the elements entering
into it; thus their delicate equiHbrium is overthrown. Just what aspects
of the whole are forced anew into prominence, and thus into interference
with others, depends entirely upon the make-up of the situation and upon
outside forces pressing in. The aesthetic experience has served its purpose
if it has placed the state or the individual in a condition to face new
problems with increased vigor. It supplies a new level of approach; it

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 47

lifts clear of old entanglements. Without these times of replenishment of
vigor, of emotional apprehension of the significance of its life, we cannot
tell in what futile struggles and disorders the energy of a people might be
squandered. We all know the exhausting and depressing effects of tm-
remitting effort. It is in moments of apparent lull, but of real invigoration,
that nations and individuals win new strength and new outlook.

n. AESTHETIC ORIGINS IN THE RACE

The present section aims to develop a position implied in the preceding
section. If the aesthetic experience, recognized as such, is most unequivo-
cal in social situations of a relatively high degree of complexity and organiza-
tion, we should expect to find it revealing itself less and less clearly as we
go back along the line of social development, until it reaches the stage
where it is only implicit in the most rudimentary social and occupational
activities. Beginning at the other end of the social series, I shall try to
show that the aesthetic emerges and develops together with certain favor-
able types of social organization. In using the term "origin," I do not
wish to be understood as pointing out absolute beginnings for the aesthetic.
Just as the "aesthetic moment" is an essential, though often overlooked,
phase of every thinking process in the individual, so it is present in embryo
in every stage of social evolution. The problem is rather : Given the most
obscure and least differentiated form of the aesthetic, what conditions con-
trol its emergence into an unmistakable and unambiguous type of experi-
ence? That is the only formulation of any problem of origin that can
hope to escape shipwreck in hopeless paradox.

A useful distinction to keep in mind at this point is the distinction made
by Baldwin between the stages of evolution in the biologic or animal series,
culminating in the appearance of mind, and the stages of evolution in the
social or cultural series that the human race has gone through since the
appearance of mind.^ In showing the intimate relations of the two, he
points out that biologic evolution in the case of man represents a practically
completed series, and is correspondingly stable, serving as a basis for the
operations of mind in the social series, and modified or suppressed by it only
within pretty definite limits. My object in calling attention to the distinction
is to remind us that, although the aesthetic experience is psychological, and
its origins are accordingly to be traced in the social series, yet it presupposes
and makes use of the infinitely longer biologic series. Our physical organ-
ism in its essential aspects is an inheritance from remote prehuman ancestors
and represents the accumulations and adjustments of so vast a history that
I Social and Ethical Interpretations, pp. 189-95.

48 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

even modern evolutionary biology can tell us of its stages in the most sche-
matic and imperfect way. Our whole bodily mechanism, accordingly, has
the cohesion and persistence that come from long and satisfactory adapta-
tions. It is a bundle of peculiarly settled and ingrained physiological
habits, co-ordinated ways of doing things that may normally be counted
on to look out for themselves. The extent of their mutual reinforcement
and interdependence is shown by the fact that they all manifest periodicity
or rhythm, the only type of action in which stimulus and response are
reciprocal. It is on the basis and with the help of these co-ordinated
physiological rhythms — of breathing, circulation, or the more minute
anabolic and katabolic processes in cell-substance — that all our distinc-
tively mental activities are built. No matter how elaborate or how "lofty"
the pursuit in which we are engaged, it involves throughout accommodations
of the organism. A If it make too heavy a demand upon organic processes,
or thwart their normal functioning, strain and exhaustion follow. In the
rare cases in which higher and lower activities are in full accord, in which
mental processes or the bodily processes mediating them fall in with and sup-
plement the organic rhythms, we have a wonderful sense of ease, expansion
of capacity. And let any of the organic processes become seriously dis-
turbed, and all our conscious operations are thrown out of gear. The
bitter compulsions of hunger, lassitude, disease, and death force us to a
realization of the importance of the organic series. Such a statement in
terms of series suggests a false parallelism, and in general lays stress on an
interaction that is the most obvious commonplace of daily life. But in.
discussing a specific type of conscious experience we are, I think, in danger
of ignoring the participation of directly life-serving organic processes.

Keeping in mind, then, the biologic basis and implication of all con-
scious experience, let us turn to the social series. What man was under
really primitive conditions we have no direct means of knowing, and all our
reconstructions of him must be unverifiable hypotheses, based on insuffi-
cient data. So-called "primitive society," conceived largely on analogies
drawn from modern savages, is very far from being truly primitive. But,
by piecing together the indirect evidence from biology and geology and the
meager traces of his pursuits, we can form some dim picture of the life of
early man.

The "kitchen-middens" along various sea-coasts and river-courses, the
rubbish in certain caves, point to a time when he subsisted on shell-fish
and roots, not daring to venture back into the forests for fear of wild beasts.
Such an existence antedates the invention of the rudest rough-stone weap-
on, the simplest snare. Consciousness under such conditions must have

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 49

been chiefly auxiliary to food-getting; and since the collection of mussels,
snails, berries, seeds, and roots are processes involving slight need of inge-
nuity or skill, the type of consciousness sufficient for these employments must
have been vague, diffused, specialized only to the extent of a few simple habits
on a direct instinctive basis. It undoubtedly showed variations, but on
the whole it displayed a minimum of focalization, a maximum of "sleepy"
or dispersed attention. People restricted to this sort of food-supply and
approximating this mental apathy have been encountered in barren
parts of Australia.^ James describes this "scattered condition of mind"
as common to us all at times, and as probably usual with animals. It is ex-
perienced in partial anaesthesia, in somnolence, in various hypnotic states.*
It is therefore not inconceivable that it was once the prevailing and not the
exceptional type of mental life. Moreover, in such a life, where the definite
reactions were limited to a few serial processes, connected with food-getting,
there was little opportunity for reconstruction of a situation. Sudden
emergencies, such as attack or failure of food-supply, were more likely
to result in elimination of the individual than in his meeting them resource-
fully, in his making a change in habitat or in the nature of his food. Indif-
ference, inattention, a shrinking from stimuli, were his greatest safeguards.
In physical strength and agility man was inferior to many contemporary
animals. He was powerless in the face of many forces of the natural world.
If he escaped them, it was by virtue of hiding or running away, not by
challenging or attacking. Our temporary helplessness in the face of sudden
and imperfectly grasped danger, the weakening and loosening of muscular
tensions that accompany even the tendency to flight, are indisputable
signs of the primordial character of negative response to a stimulus which
the organism has no means of defining and using positively. Such a mode
of response, of course, goes far back of man in the biologic series, and
never exists in isolation from more positive forms of reaction, but it was
reinforced by the conditions of early human life. There is perhaps danger
of exaggerating the bewildered helplessness of primitive man. He had the
animal equipment of instinct. Yet it has been pointed out that in one
sense dawning mind must have acted immediately as a disadvantage by
checking the hair-trigger operation of instinct, though the appearance of
mind means that instincts had become antagonistic or ambiguous; and
consciousness very probably emerged as a compensation for what man had
lost physically in assuming the erect posture.

1 W. Howitt, History 0} Discovery in Australia (quoting account of Dampier,
1688), Vol. I, pp. 67, 68.

2 Principles 0} Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 404, 405.

50 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Just how long, and with what variations this rudimentary group-life and
rudimentary consciousness persisted is both futile and irrelevant to ask.
Some such low form of social and mental organization must be postulated
as preceding the hunting and warlike types of society and patterns of mind.
Sociologists are emphasizing today more than they did a few years ago the
assumption of a long, non-predatory, sub-miUtant, relatively pacific and
sedentary period, in which human association took definite form, and which
prepared for later oppositions and more highly organized social types. What
I wish to point out is that in this protoplasmic kind of social life, limited
to performing a few simple serial acts hardly differentiated into occupations,
the aesthetic moment is barely discernible to analysis, and certainly not a
part of conscious experience beyond giving a faint toning to processes
chiefly biological. Mental life was too fluid and shifting an accompani-
ment to detach itself from the total experience ; and the total experience was
meager in discriminations, and directed toward a relatively fixed end. In
other words, these activities were mostly narrow habits, functioning in
practical independence of one another and verging more or less toward the
automatic. Failure in their operation, of course, aroused emotional dis-
turbance, as does all checking of activities immediately furthering biologic
processes; but the outcome was more likely to be prostration than stimula-
tion to more efficient control. Attention was not sufficiently focused to
direct any such cluster of activities as would have given rise to aesthetic
satisfaction and to even the rudest "work of art."

In thinking of the struggle for existence and the working of the law of
survival of the fittest in the social series, we too readily think of their opera-
tion as uniform, at least in the earlier stages of social development. But
the geologists and the biologists have made it clear that there are times of
violent change and times of comparative stability in the course of organic
evolution, and the sociologists and the anthropologists tell us that the same
thing holds true in the evolution of society. We find what may conveni-
ently be called static and dynamic periods, so long as we keep in mind that
the terms indicate merely different degrees of variation and development.
Moreover, it is necessary to remember also that all division of social prog-
ress into types or stages is schematic and methodological, not descriptive.
In reality, there have been all sorts of overlappings and survivals. We see
this clearly in society today, and now as in every period the coexistence of
different levels of culture produces, as it has produced, new dislocations and
demands for readjustment.

With these qualifications, we may say that the truly primitive period in
human society was a static period. Its gains were slow ; its achievements

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 5 1

more in the line of conserving and maintaining the existing level than in
lifting to a higher level.

But with changing conditions, either sudden or through slow accumula-
tions, came variations important enough to be perpetuated. Imagination
can divine the transition from the sluggish and inchoate primitive stage to
the active hunting stage. How man overcame his fear of wild beasts,
forests, and darkness we cannot know. But even avoiding the larger and
more dangerous beasts must have made him familiar with their habits, and
the capture of small, defenseless beasts have led, through a series of acci-
dents and tentative advances, to the use of natural missiles and to the inven-
tion by some prehistoric Watts or Edison of the first rude club or spear or
trap. Armed with these and with that other great invention, a mode of
producing fire artificially, man began his long warfare with other forms of
life and with the material world, in the course of which he has molded them
no less than they have developed him.

With the emergence of the hunting period man's attitude toward his
stimuli was no longer predominantly habitual and negative. It became
increasingly active, positive, constructive. His food-supply grew more
plentiful and at the same time more uncertain, since game cannot be
counted on as can plant life and lower animal forms, such as moUusks,
snails, grubs. But its pursuit drew upon and developed a far wider range
of aptitudes, and necessitated a very different mental pattern. He became
wary, alert, resourceful, so far as concerned the killing of animals for food.
He was, moreover, farther removed from the pinch of actual starvation;
for, if game failed, he could fall back on his old vegetable diet, which,
indeed, there is no reason to suppose he ever entirely gave up. But interest
and attention shifted to the new food-supply. In the hunt attention was
keen, every sense was temporarily on the alert. And since food-getting was
a group affair, and many men were needed in the tracking and surrounding
of the larger and fiercer animals, social co-operation became a much more
specific and mentally intense thing than ever before. The forms of co-oper-
ation in hunting vary enormously from sporadic efforts on the part of some
Australian groups to the closely knit hunting-pattern society of the Iroquois.
But the almost universal distribution of the totemic system, the greater
number of animal totems, with the wide ramifications of their influence
upon social structure, show to what an extent the occupation of hunting
affected the life of "natural peoples."

Out of this closer and more distinctive social organization, and the in-
crease in mental and bodily vigor due to more abundant food and to the
mobile hunter life, arose new occasions for conflict. Groups of men came

52 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

into collision over hunting areas, the spoils of the chase, and so on. And
out of feuds between groups grew the necessity for the chief and other
differentiations in group control, leading to the definitely militant type of
society.

On the industrial side, the hunting period introduced the first marked
division of labor, that running along the line of sex. The primitive pre-
eminence, or at least equality, of woman as a provider of food — a task for
which she was well equipped so long as food-getting meant collecting nuts
and seeds, scraping rocks, and digging for roots — gave way before the
superior equipment of man for long and arduous hunting expeditions.
But, although shut out from the excitements of the new pursuit, she still
carried on the routine activities involved in the preparation of the new food,
as well as retaining her old task of collecting vegetable food. From this
delegation to woman of serial and routine processes, she became practically
the primitive manufacturer, tanning the skins of animals for garments,
making baskets, grinding seeds, and, later, weaving and making pottery.
To her, too, are credited the beginnings of agriculture and the domesti-
cation of animals. It may be said that she carried on the intermediary
processes, while man reserved to himself those involving high stimulations
and satisfactions. It is also true that, through her control of the making
of complex objects, woman was probably, to a large extent, the primi-
tive artist. Here, too, it is necessary to guard against thinking that the
specialization was in any sense rigid.

Man, for his part, under the brisk stimulations of hunting life, won some
of the most notable gains in human history. He devised the snare, the
spear, the knife, the bow and arrow. His attitude toward his weapons is
significant of his heightened sense of personality, or, to put it more accurately,
of himself as an agency. These weapons, the trophies of the chase,) such
as claws, skins, horns, which he displays on his body, even the carcass of
the slain animal, are to his mind not things,) not mere instruments or
products, but extensions of himself, united to him by a very real bond. In
all stages of the hunting era, and among modern peoples at this level, we
find this same feeling. Weapons, trophies, ornaments, clothes, any thing
intimately connected with the individual at times of emotional excitation,
are thought of, not as property, but as direct participants in the situation of
which their owner is the center.

The hunting type of social situation, then, whenever and wherever it
appears, is a period of active performance, and involves a far greater
degree of social movement and control than is found in the rudimentary
social situation out of which it arises. On the other hand, the hunting

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 53

type of society and the hunting pattern of mind operate within narrow
limits and are marked by extreme alternations of control and lack of control,
of effort and relaxation, of concentration and dispersion of attention. After
the strain and excitement of stalking the quarry, the cunning restraint
necessary to insure its capture, the jubilation of success, comes the reaction
due to excessive fatigue and indulgence. The process as a whole involves
extravagant waste of energy and exhaustion, leading frequently to stupor.

Forethought, acute for the immediate, problematic situation, does not
extend beyond it, has not been generalized so as to apply to other situations.
The reason for this lies largely in the nature of the difficulties met and
mastered in the hunting stage. They are irregularly recurrent, but the
outcome is in each case uncertain, and the means of achieving the end are
precarious. Conditions can be only roughly determined in advance; con-
trol is only partial and spasmodic. Men cannot deal with one crisis, and
win from it a broad basis of advantage for dealing with the next. Each
presents itself in as acute a form as the one before it. Such experience
stamps in the anticipatory, restlessly active, explosive type of consciousness.
It is essentially the gambling, speculating, dare-devil temper of mind.
As an attitude, it is a part of our racial inheritance. If owe first impulse is
to shrink from a threatening object, our second is to grapple with it, to
overcome its recalcitrancy to our purposes. But such a mental attitude
lacks steadiness; it dissipates energy and squanders its emotional accumu-
lations, which are, moreover, violent, fluctuating, and accordingly exciting
rather than pleasurable. Fatigue and prostration follow overstimulation.

To the savage stalking his prey or ambushing his enemy suspense and
strain last to the moment of achievement, and then discharge in violent
manifestations of satisfaction. Hunter or warrior drags home his spoils
and his victims, animal or human; he shouts and capers as do the rest of
the group. To the savage mind there is probably no clear distinction between
victors, prey, and shouting throng. They are all part of one intensely active
and highly emotional situation. Modern psychology, whether of the crowd
or of the individual, tells us that emotion stands for an undifferentiated
continuum; thought, for discrimination.^ The savage has not reached the
stage where he can abstract a mental state from the total activity. Pain
and pleasure alike, and the complexer forms of affective experience that
we call emotions, still inhere in the concrete experience.

It is not without reason, then, that inquirers into the racial origins of
art find its beginnings in the "festal throng," the group in the sway of high
excitement. Such situations are typical of the predatory phase of social

I Gordon, Psychology of Meaning, pp. 62, 63.

54 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

development, and contain the germs of the dance, song, and drama, which
are found to be the rudimentary art-forms of hunting peoples. Gummere
cites a mass of survival material pointing to this in the folk-literature and
customs of European peasants ; and he and others have collected still more
abundant evidence from modern savages. He says:

The earliest form of the drama consists mainly of action and gesture in the
dance, so as to repeat a contemporary event of communal interest — war and the
chase, or, with farming folk, and more in reminiscence, the doings of seed-time
and harvest; it is clear that the rude songs and shouts that went with step and
gesture and mimicry must have been improvised.'

Him says:

If we use the word in its widest sense, so as to include every representation by
action, drama can be spoken of as the very earliest of all the imitative arts ....
As an outward sign of thought action is more immediate than words. Dramatic
communication does not even presuppose any conscious intention nor any common
consent.*

Any attempt to revive the original emotional experience with its trium-
phant culmination must be called a work of art, whatever be the motive
that led to it. This motive is not aesthetic in our sense until late in the his-
tory of social development. It is practical in a vague, unformulated way —
to serve as stimulus to new achievements in hunting or warfare, to act as
"sympathetic magic" in procuring a fresh supply of game or fresh conquest
of foes, to convey the experience to younger members of the group who did
not participate in it; later it may become purely ritualistic and stereotyped.
But its object is always the reinstatement of a situation involving successful
control, and complicated and diversified enough to be suffused with emotion.
In the course of reinstatement, the situation inevitably becomes abbreviated,
more or less symbolic, accompanied by less waste and fatigue. The original
wild and random leaping and shouting grow more rhythmical, and take on
the form of rude dance and song; the movements and gestures of stalking,
capturing, etc., gather around certain episodes, and become dramatic pan-
tomime. But wherever we find such representations — and they are univer-
sal among hunting peoples — we find that they deal with the dominant, life-
maintaining activities of the group; are essentially social or communal in
character, heightening the sense of group homogeneity through reviving and
communicating the emotions of satisfaction and control of a specific situa-
tion. We can conjecture, moreover, that at a time when mental construc-
tions were still wavering, and memory of the past was only just emerging as

I Beginnthgs of Poetry, p. 428.

' Origins 0} Art, p. 150.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 55

a means of controlling the future, it may have been necessary to stir up the
whole emotional and activity matrix of an idea in order to get any sort of
grip on it as a tool for further use. This is what James calls "total recall."
So that both socially and psychologically such revivals or reconstructions of
a situation would be of direct survival value for the people practicing them,
and would in themselves lead indirectly to new forms of control.

The elaborate and complicated group ceremonies that we find among
modem hunting peoples, such as the Australians and the North American
Indian tribes, have undoubtedly hardened into their present form through
immemorial use, and are to a considerable extent purely ceremonial and
ritualistic. But they reveal the characteristics that I have mentioned.
The interminable and detailed initiation ceremonies of the central Aus-
tralian tribes, described with such scientific accuracy by Messrs. Spencer
and Gillen, have for their obvious purpose the incorporation of the young
men into the group, and the stamping upon them of its traditions and modes
of action; but this is accomplished by means of dramatic representations
of incidents involving the various totem animals of the group and the group
ancestors, themselves akin to the totems, and by group dancing and sing-
ing. Conventional as many of these performances are, they nevertheless
tend to stir up in the minds of the youths, and to some degree in the minds
of the whole group, the tensions and relaxations, excitements and satis-
factions, that accompanied the original occurrence.

A curious fact among the central Australians, which has, so far as I know,
not been satisfactorily explained, is that, though their sense of private prop-
erty is very imperfectly developed and extends otherwise only to articles of
clothing and of personal use, which are thought of as immediate extensions
of the individual himself, partaking of his own nature, yet there is private
and even inherited ownership of songs and dramatic ceremonies. Those
relating to each totem group belong to certain men of that group, who have
the right of choosing who shall perform them, and even of giving them away
as a mark of special favor.'' I know of no other kind of property among
them regarding which the rights of individuals are clearly recognized. It
would be worth while inquiring whether this fact has been taken into account
in any of the theories of the origin of property. From our point of view
it is suggestive as showing how the work of art has contributed to the
heightening of the sense of individuality and personality, as well as rein-
forcing the feeling of social integrity.

It used to be commented on as paradoxical and inexplicable that the

I Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 311, 312, chaps^
iii-ix, passim.

^1

56 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

graphic or representative art of the prehistoric European peoples of the
hunting period, the men of the "rough-stone age," should be so much more
realistic and spirited, show so much more artistic skill, than the same class
of works of art among peoples in the pastoral and agricultural stages, farther
advanced along the paths of civilization. The difficulty lies in part in a
failure to discriminate between art as representation and art as decoration
or design. The famous etchings of animals on the bits of mammoth
tusk and reindeer horn found in the caverns of Dordogne, above all,
the famous dagger from the same source with the carved handle
representing a springing reindeer, are undoubtedly vastly superior as
naturalistic representations to the stiff and uncouth figures dating from the
"smooth-stone " or the early metal periods. But the apparent retrogression
is easily explained on a basis of occupational attention. The animals por-
trayed with such fidelity and vigor on the fragments in the rubbish heaps
of the cave-men represent the dominant and absorbing occupation of men
during the hunting period in Europe. These animals were the focus point
of the struggle for existence; they stood for the most violent and effectual
reactions of the men who pursued and killed them. In other words, cer-
tain dangerous animals were the cave-men's most fully and solidly con-
structed objects, and were known with an intimacy belonging only to objects
that thus sum up and exhaust the life-maintaining activities of an entire
precarious situation. Etchings or carvings of them summed up and revived
the whole bundle of reactions involved, symbolized a complicated process
of control.^ What purpose was in the minds of their makers we cannot
say. As I have already suggested, different motives were probably at
work at different times, or dimly recognized at the same time — of magic,
communication, recall, incentive. Reinstatement, symbolization, of the
experience chiefly for the sake of the emotional satisfactions involved,
would be of necessity a secondary motive, and to my mind one of slow
growth. It means a far higher degree of abstraction from the active
situation than the hunting type of mind has reached. And the suggestion
that primitive works of art derive from "primeval man's weariness of
inactivity in the periods when food was plentiful and life luxurious,"'
that they are a sort of substitutional exercise of habits built up in the hunt,
bases the aesthetic, to my mind, on a subordinate, if not negligible,
motive. It is practically Spencer's theory of play and art as due to the

I Cf. Baldwin Brown, The Fine Arts (revised English edition, 1902), pp. 27-30;
E. Grosse, Beginnings of Art, pp. 163-65, 198, 199.

» A. E. Tanner, "Association of Ideas," University of Chicago Contributions to
Philosophy, Vol. II, No. 3, pp. 59, 60.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 57

useless discharge of surplus energy. And on the social side it makes art
a product of mere leisure. The positive element in this view, and at the
same time its inadequacy, I shall touch upon later.

With the growth of the pastoral and agricultural forms of life matters
changed. This does not mean that the predatory attitudes and aptitudes
disappeared altogether, or that the later occupational stages are to be
assigned to clearly marked periods or to a uniform order of appearance
among all peoples. Environmental conditions and resources bring about
vast differences in the careers of different peoples. The Australians on
their treeless and arid plains were doomed to arrest, just as the peoples
of temperate, well-watered, and well-wooded Europe were spurred to prog-
ress. But with domestic animals and planted crops experience became
broader and more stable. Crises directly threatening life were far less
frequent. A situation once under control was not likely to recur in an
acutely problematic form, but served as a basis for fvirther activities of an
intermediate instead of a directly life-maintaining character. Food-getting
operations were no longer irregular and violent, requiring exhausting expend-
iture of emotional and physical energy and leaving no margin for the build-
ing-up of other useful types of conduct. Life gained in breadth and in
security at the expense of emotional intensity; it utilized and husbanded
bodily activities that had hitherto been wasted and exhausted in a narrow
circle of pursuits. While both the tending of herds and the cultivation of
plants involved uncertainties and difficulties, they were uncertainties and
difficulties that were to a considerable extent regularly recurrent, and could
therefore be planned for and discounted in advance. With the develop-
ment of these occupations forethought and memory were strengthened;
regular habits were set up along numerous lines; group custom became a
stronger social bond. The pastoral life, more or less nomadic in form,
undoubtedly retained more precarious situations than did the agricultural.
Occupations having to do with animal life are fuller of problems and crises
than those having to do with plants. But animals under domestication are
animals under control. They secure, and at the same time alter the nature
of the animal food-supply. Pastoral peoples rarely kill their herd-animals
for food, except in connection with tribal ceremonies, developing into sacri-
fice; but they depend on them largely for milk and cheese. This gives rise
to a set of industries of the manufacturing or mediate type. Animals also
furnish materials for tents and for clothing, and so become the center of the
weaving industry, with its varied interrelated processes. Domestic animals
likewise give a powerful impetus to intercoiu-se with other social groups.
This intercourse is partly hostile, partly peaceful. While pastoral Ufej leads

$8 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

to disputes about grazing grounds, to raiding and driving off the flocks of
adjacent groups, it at the same time strengthens the sense of property, per-
haps first developing the notion of ownership of land ; and it offers the first
real opportunity for the beginnings of trade. Cattle, as most languages
reveal, were the first important medium of exchange.

With the development of agriculture men had chiefly to reckon with
the vicissitudes and difficulties of climate, weather, and soil. The cycle
of the seasons determined their main activities. Even more than in pastoral
life, the events on which their interests and attention were centered were
recurrent, rhythmical. The controUing influence of the seasonal or "cosmu-
logical" rhythms is seen wherever agriculture is the principal occupation of
a people. The customs, beliefs, and folk-lore of agricultural peoples aU over
the world, conspicuously among Europeans, who have been most closely
studied, cluster about planting, cultivating, harvesting, storing grain, the
olive, the vine. The whole festival and ceremonial life centers at these
points. Furthermore, in agriculture the number of intermediate steps
between planting and the final utilization of the product as food is very
great. These stages succeed one another slowly, and each demands bodily
labor of a simple and serial nature. Any such movements as those involved
in sowing, cutting, binding, threshing, with repetition rapidly become habit-
ual— that is to say, rhythmical — in character. All regular manual work
sets up characteristic bodily rhythms, differing according to the special form
of labor, but all relatively simple. In addition to this, agriculture demands
the co-operation of numbers of people in carrying out successfully some of
its operations. And wherever a group of people work together at a rhyth-
mical bodily task, they tend to fall into the same rhythm. Working in
this common rhythm greatly facilitates the movements made. It increases
speed; it lessens fatigue. And so the rhythm is accentuated, is stressed by
beats, is accompanied by song. The effect of rhythmical group-labor
closely approximates the effect of group festival-dance and song. In
agricultural life, in fact, the two coalesce; for the agricultural festival and
religious ceremony is made up largely of dramatic representation of the
typical agricultural processes, of communal dance in the labor-rhythms
and songs on agricultural matters; and, on the other hand, these festal
performances, with their emotional accompaniments, react into the actual
group-work, and give it a festal and emotional character. Recent students
of social and aesthetic origins have emphasized now one of these aspects,
now the other. Biicher's important study, Arbeit und Rhythmus,^ traces
the origin of poetry and music to concerted and rhythmic labor and to the

I Especially chaps, ii, iii, vii.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 59

labor-songs that arose in connection with it. Gummere dwells on the strong
communal spirit of work in the fields and its festal representation. "An
agricultural community," he says, "whether in its rudest stage, a horde that
lives in fertile river bottoms as distinguished from the nomadic, predatory
bands of the plains, or in the civilization of feudal Europe, always tends to
homogeneous conditions, and always fosters communal song."^ Mannhardt
in his Wald und Feldkulte, Frazer in his Golden Bough, and others give
abundant examples of group drama, song, and dance arising out of the
agricultural pursuits of early Europe. The Eleusinian Mysteries, for
example, and the cult of Dionysus, out of which grew the Greek drama,
are traced to local rites attendant upon the cultivation of grain and the vine
respectively, by some even to grain and grape totems. ^ Peasant customs
all over Europe, the "Beltane fires" in May to favor the growing crops,
the sheaves of grain set apart for ceremonial observances at harvest and
known as "kern-babies" or "maidens," all testify to the prevalence of agri-
cultural festivities and rituals. The lovely myth of Demeter and Perse-
phone, so closely associated with the cult at Eleusis, has obviously an origin
of this kind.

We see, accordingly, that the festival and life-maintaining pursuits
play as great a part among agricultural as among hunting peoples, but that
the direction and objects of attention are dififerent. Agriculture necessi-
tates far more stable, rhythmical, and mutually supplementary modes of
action. The basis of achievement is broader; there is less waste of e£Fort,
fewer violent alternations of excitement and prostration accompanying a
narrow range of activities. Emotion is more diffused, less concentrated.
Yet the processes and interests of agriculture are too varied and too closely
interwoven to permit of their becoming routine, relieving them from the
need of attention. Ends have to be kept in mind and pursued with patience
and sagacity; it is only the intermediary and constituent processes that take
care of themselves and by assuming the rhythmic form contribute to the
ease and pleasant toning of the whole.

We trace this rhythmic character in the whole group of industrial
activities not directly connected with pastoral or agricultural pursuits,
but flourishing on the basis of physical well-being which they assure.
Weaving, making of pottery, of weapons and tools, of permanent dwellings,
all reveal a feeling for ordered repetition. Conventional pattern, ornament,
whether of dots, crosses, lines, spirals, or their more elaborate combinations,
show the same rhythmic interval that we find in choral dance and song at

1 Beginnings oj Poetry, p. 279; also whole passage, pp. 279-308.

2 F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History oj Religion, Essays XXIII, XXIV.

^

60 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

this Stage of development. It is not accidental that conventional design
coexists with agriculture, nor that such design appears upon objects of com-
mon use. As the toilers in the fields found their labor lightened by singing
in time to rhythmic movements, so the workers in clay, the women weaving
baskets or stuffs, gained ease and pleasure in their work by means of reiter-
ated spots of color or alternating threads of contrasting dyes. Such work,
though it seems to us the result of individual effort, was no doubt carried
on by groups of women together, probably to the accompaniment of appro-
priate song and swaying of the body. Gummere cites group-songs connected
with spinning and knitting and with grinding at the hand-mill.^ It is not
forcing an arbitrary contrast, I think, to say that, while the arts of hunting
and war are chiefly realistic and representational, the arts of peaceful rural
occupations and of industry are chiefly conventional, the arts of rhythm,
pattern, and design. The two forms of life never exist altogether in isola-
tion. With the establishment of fairly coherent and stable agricultural
communities came further division of labor, growing wealth, and with them
class distinctions and trade and other rivalries, both within each community
and among communities, leading to warfare on a larger and better organized
scale. As a result of successful warfare, fundamental industrial processes
are commonly handed over to subject populations or to slaves taken in war,
and there arises that social prejudice against productive labor that is,
according to Professor Veblen, a conspicuous mark of the leisure class
evolved in accordance with barbarian or predatory standards of culture. '
Wherever we find industry carried on only by a class and under social stigma,
the artistic element that we recognize in the earlier products lessens or disap-
pears— a sign that the work is no longer done in the old collective, rhythmic
way, with a sense of pleasant mastery of materials and of co-operation with
the group. With the loss of the "folk-spirit" articles of common use lose
their artistic character.

In summing up this brief attempt at a reconstruction of primitive life
and primitive social psychology, we find that in the rudest conceivable
human society there was not sufficient organization and control, not enough
focalizing of attention, to produce a recognizable aesthetic experience or
work of art, even of the most rudimentary type. Instincts and a few
narrow and serial habits kept consciousness well down toward the auto-
matic type of response; and beyond this mental life was probably of the
character of what we call today the "fringe" — vague, diffused, affective
rather than cognitive or volitional. In the hunting stage, experience,

1 Op. cit., pp. 269-72.

2 Theory 0} the Leisure Class, pp. 19-21, 35-43, and passim.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 6 1

although still narrow, became well organized in the one line of pursuing
and capturing animals. Within the limits of this particular cluster of acts,
tension was extreme and prolonged, and resolution occurred suddenly at
the moment of climax in the killing of the prey. Here we find some of
the conditions for the emergence of the aesthetic, a complex of activities
and a high degree of satisfaction at the moment of successful issue. But
the experience is painfully toned, and the satisfaction is divided and
marred by the fatigue and prostration of suspense and over-violent action.
So the aesthetic at this stage is narrow and partial. The work of art pro-
duced in dramatic dance and song or graphic representation has spirit and
vigor, and undoubtedly helps to develop a sense of the aesthetic in its pro-
ducers ; but it lacks restraint ; the motives for its construction are practical,
and the result is sometimes attributed to an external agency. In the less pred-
atory and more peaceful pastoral and agricultural stages, social life becomes
more stable and more diversified. Attention plays over a broader range of
objects. Social consolidation takes place through a cycle of recurrent and
regular activities. The food-supply becomes relatively secure, and a margin
is won for the development of various intermediary occupations. The
tilling of the soil and the working-up of the various products into food, the
making of baskets, pottery, tools, and weapons, the weaving of cloth, the
working of metals, bring together a host of activities hitherto exercised more
or less in isolation, and arouse and confirm a sense of successful attainment.
In such work the values of the different stages for the most part survive and
become incorporated into the effect of the whole. So that, wherever we find
considerable elaboration in the ordinary occupations of a people, there we
find distinct art products, stirring the sense of completeness and control
that we have called aesthetic, and helping to foster this sense and to reveal
it to reflection.

This does not imply as yet, however, a distinct class of men recognized

as artists or the work of art produced for its own sake, apart from the

practical demand that it meets, the practical part that it plays. The dis-

N tinction between the useful and the beautiful, in any rigid sense, is, indeed,

■^ a modern distinction, and does not go back of the eighteenth century.

It is often said nowadays, as I have already suggested, that art is the
product of a pretty wide economic margin, with its accompanying leisure;
■5 1 and, so far as this goes — which is not very far — it is perfectly true. Where
the struggle for mere subsistence is pressing, or the menace of hostile forces
is always dominant, there is no chance for that co-operation among activi-
ties which is an essential requirement for the dawning of the aesthetic ex-
perience. Crises are frequent, narrow in range, but acute. Problems are

62 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

solved serially. There is slight accumulation of stable and successful adjust-
ments. Professor William I. Thomas, in a criticism of Spencer's derivation
of the artist class — as of all other professional classes — from the medicine-
man and the priest, whom Spencer practically identifies, although there is
serious objection to such a view, points out, with justice, that the best recent
evidence indicates that the artist class is not the outgrowth of any partic-
ular occupation — is, accordingly, not primarily and exclusively religious and
ceremonial in its origin, but arises wherever there is security and leisure,
and therefore chiefly under the shadow of court patronage, or at least under
the protection of some powerful and affluent person.^ It is well to recognize
this fact as an important condition, and one that has been commonly over-
looked; but, taken by itself, it is too much like making the artist a mere
"hanger-on" of society, a member of the equivocal or exploiting classes,
and therefore akin to the criminal. Such a view is, of course, popular in
certain quarters. The grounding of art upon leisure is sometimes stretched
to the point of making it a product altogether of superfluity and idleness,
and leads to exaggerated insistence upon its non-utilitarian and non-life-
conserving character, to the "play theory" in its extreme form. The truth
regarding the relation of leistire to art and to the aesthetic experience seems
to be that leisure is at best only a preliminary and largely negative condition.
Mere leisure, mere freedom from want and danger, do not of themselves
give rise to the aesthetic experience, which stands for a positive constructive
process, a positive combination and co-operation of activities under the
guidance of some organizing end and interest. This, leisure of itself does
not supply, although it furnishes opportunity for the gathering together of
materials susceptible of shaping into an aesthetic whole.

Hitherto I have not attempted to deal with the paradox of the high
feeling value of the aesthetic experience and its apparent lack of precedent
conflict and strain, through the resolution of which its characteristic tone
of satisfaction, ease, facilitation, might be accounted for. The explanation,
so far as it goes, is to be sought in the realm of racial origins, of which we
have been speaking, although it strikes its roots far back into the biologic
series, and although we are still in the dark as to the mechanism employed.
But evolutionary biology and psychology, particularly the modern psychol-
ogy of the emotions, have called attention to the survival in the individual,
in syncopated and abbreviated form as attitudes, tendencies, dispositions
within the organism, of types of response formerly completing themselves
in outward movements, acts of high utility and purposiveness in dealing

I "The Relation of the Medicine-Man to the Origin of the Professional Occupa-
tions," University of Chicago Decennial Publications, Vol. IV.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 63

with particular sorts of stimulations. The tendencies to retreat and to
attack are conspicuous instances of such attitudes. James would include
them among instincts, and enumerates many others — curiosity, secretive-
ness, acquisitiveness, constructiveness, sociability, and the like. Whether
we are entitled to call reactions of so general a nature, and called forth by
stimuli so varied, instincts, is a debatable question; but these tendencies, at
any rate, represent definite acts, once fully accomplished and of tremendous
survival value in the early history of the race. They are certainly to be
distinguished from mere unorganized and unselected impulses. Biology
has familiarized us with the notion of rudimentary or atrophied organs
once actively functioning under appropriate conditions now superseded,
and even with the notion of certain organs, such as the flippers of a whale,
which have been gradually pressed into the service of functions quite differ-
ent from those in whose service they developed. Structure alters more
slowly than does function, after specialization has set in, and serves as
resource in various ways — a sort of reserve fund that can be drawn upon in
emergencies. This persistence in reduced and altered form of structures
once actively functional is not confined wholly to ovir physiological make-
up. It is equally true psychologically, although we need to guard against
thinking of psychological structure and function in set physical terms. They
stand rather as limiting terms with reference to a total process of control.
Moreover, in dealing with the earlier manifestations of intelligence we
cannot make any hard and fast distinctions between the physiological and
the psychical. Mind comes in as a means of reorganizing conflicting and
ambiguous bodily reactions. With more highly differentiated organization,
certain simple and immediate types of action, such as the "tropisms" of
lower forms, have been entirely superseded. Others, no longer functioning
independently, still play a necessary part in the human economy. No
longer needed in themselves, they have served as a basis for further develop-
ment, and have become incorporated into the more elaborate mechanism.
Darwin, as is well known, explained the typical bodily expressions of
femotion as vestiges of formerly useful movements. James, in his organic
theory of emotion as the immediate consciousness of reflex changes within
the body, admits that some of the most striking of these motor changes are
reduced forms of past serviceable actions.^ And Dewey in his two papers
on "The Theory of Emotion" explicitly says:

It is then in the reduction of activities once performed for their own sake, to
attitudes now useful simply as supplying a contributory, a reinforcing, or a check-
ing factor, in some more comprehensive activity, that we have all the conditions

I Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 478-80.

64 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

for high emotional disturbance. The tendency to large diffusive waves of dis-
charge is present, and the inhibition of this outgoing activity through some per-
ception or idea is also present. The attitude stands for a recapitulation of thou-
sands of acts formerly done, ends formerly reached. It represents the most
thoroughly established habits and co-ordinations of the past.'

According to this view the emotion is aroused when these inherited atti-
tudes are involved conspicuously in a new activity. As Dewey points out,
they may check or reinforce this activity. If they fall in with it at once, or
with some phase of it, there is no noticeable tension or inhibition, and there-
fore no emotion. If, on the other hand, they pull strongly in a contrary
direction, there results a sense of strain and difficulty, the extent and depth
of which depend upon the number and the range of the subordinate activities
affected as well as upon the violence of the interference. Control is fur-
thered only by suppression of some of the warring elements. Again, if none
of these elements is suppressed, but all collaborate in the production of an
act made up of actively co-operating processes, all modifying and reinforcing
one another, there arises the consciousness of the attainment of control, a
satisfaction that is pleasurably emotional and that at its highest is obviously
aesthetic, while even at its slightest it differs from the recognized aesthetic
only in degree. It is when a considerable cluster of these attitudes and pre-
dispositions to certain movements are called out incipiently by the immediate
situation, and simultaneously coalesce with our response to it, that we have
the genuine aesthetic experience, with its feeling of sudden power and vigor,
its heightened sense of life, always indicating an unusual degree of control.
But it is only under comparatively rare conditions that a present situation
is in such complete alliance with these old racial attitudes and survivals.
Our biologic, organic past is immeasurably longer than our mental past,
and is consequently far more stable. It is not too much to say that intel-
ligence is never entirely in harmony with purely bodily, physiologic pro-
cesses. It is constantly subjecting them to strain, overexertion, fatigue.
The mutual adjustment of the older and the newer types of adaptation is for
the most part a working and tentative adjustment, not a complete one.
But there are times when the organism functioning as intelligence and the
organism functioning as plant or animal work together with comparative
adequacy. The mechanisms of sense-organ and muscle, of breathing, cir-
culation, and equilibrium, all operate at their best in the one conscious
experience. And that experience is the aesthetic. This participation of
bodily processes not under the control of consciousness has been dwelt upon
in much recent literature. Vernon Lee makes it the essential element in her

I Psychological Review, Vol. II, p. 29.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 65

analysis of the aesthetics of form. "These adjustments of breathir;g and
balance are the actual physical mechanism of the perception of Form, the
sense of relation having for its counterpart a sense of bodily tensions."* The
aesthetic perception of form is that in which these adjustments are most
fully and easily achieved and most in accordance with our established
bodily structure. She quotes from Sergi a statement to the effect that
"aesthetic pleasure, like every other, is a phenomenon, not of the cerebral,
but of the organic life of the big viscera — mainly the heart and lungs."'
And she shows that such participation of organic processes means on the
mental side the facilitated and enriched attention that is always involved in
the aesthetic experience. 3

While the dependence of the aesthetic experience upon fundamental
bodily activities by no means exhausts the possibilities of description and
explanation, it does help to account for its lack of strain or effort, and at the
same time its possession of high emotional character. The attitudes on
which it so largely draws are racial siirvivals, and as such have had their
' distinctive emotional aspects shorn away through repetition and subordina-
tion, except as they enter into and individualize present experiences. In
these new relations they give an immediate and distinctive emotional tone
to the consciousness of the moment.

Herbert Spencer was the first to apply the doctrine of the conservation of
racial experience to the problems of modern psychology and philosophy.
He based it on the doubtful biologic principle of the inheritance of acquired
characters, and used it in support of an associationist psychology and a
hedonistic ethics, making ends attained the result of calculation on the part
of our remote ancestors, if not of ourselves. Nowadays we have put the
conception on another basis by recognizing the instinctive and impulsive
character of much past and present experience, and the constant passing
back and forth of the mediate and immediate types of response. But we
are still far from a satisfactory understanding of the procedure involved, and
fall back on the general position only when a problem balks our solution in
other terms.

ni. THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

It is sometimes argued that the aesthetic experience, instead of marking
a culmination, being a "saturation," as it were, of values, is experience of a

I " Beauty and Ugliness," Contemporary Review, Vol. LXXII, pp. 550, 551.
' Ibid., p. 552.

3 "Art and Usefulness," ibid., Vol. LXXX, pp. 516, 517; cf. Professor M. W.
Calkins, Introduction to Psychology, pp. 279-81.

t

66 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

relatively undeveloped and undifferentiated kind. Instead of representing
the highest stage of co-ordination among a group of closely interlaced pro-
" I cesses, enriched through many past adaptations, it is said to furnish mere
stuff, raw material, for reflection, and to pass into it as to a more advanced
stage of evolution. In the history of the race, too, it is still sometimes main-
tained that artistic creation necessarily precedes scientific investigation and
analysis. Though so crude a generalization as Macaulay's regarding the
inverse growth of civilization and poetry has been laughed to scorn, the
notion yet lurks in more insidious form. In the individual the capacity for
aesthetic enjoyment is alleged to shrivel before the establishment of habits of
intellectual inquiry. Darwin's regretful testimony as to his loss of interest
in certain art products and activities is taken at its face value, and has
furnished the text for many a diatribe upon the blighting effects of scientific
pursuits. Tyndall's essay on the scientific imagination should be enough
to convince that withdrawal of attention from conventionally recognized
aesthetic interests does not necessarily mean an inability to take the aesthetic
attitude, to have a genuine aesthetic experience. Such strictures are based
either upon a confusion between certain accepted aesthetic materials and the
aesthetic experience as a distinctive conscious attitude, or upon a confusion
between reflection at large and particular acts of reflection. The first type
of error calls for no further comment. An experience is not of necessityi

/ non-aesthetic psychologically because it fails to center itself on poetry,!

' painting, music, or other conventional aesthetic media. With regard to the>
second error, it is enough to recall what has been said of the rhythmic nature
of experience, one type passing over into another, as occasion demands,
immediate experience breaking down and leading to experience of the recon-
structive type. While the aesthetic always stands for a resolution of con-
flicting tensions, the establishing of mutual interplay and reinforcement
among activities, and therefore indicates control of a particular situation, it
also serves as the point of departure for a new form of mental operation.
If it did not, it would be an inexplicable anomaly in experience, and would
effectuaUy blockade consciousness as a selective and adaptive agency.
One reason, to my mind, for the obscurity of much discussion of the aesthetic
experience is just this failure to take into accoimt its stimulative and origina-
tive aspects. The discharge, if we may so term it, of the aesthetic experi-
ence is, of course, not uniform. At one time it may lead to direct outward
action of one sort or another; in the artist, for instance, to the technique of
production. Again, and frequently, it leads to an act of reflective thought,
set off by some of its constituent elements; sometimes it may provoke critical
analysis of its own character and make-up. But this does not mean

\J

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 67

that many previous judgment processes have not gone to the making of
the aesthetic.

Moreover, we need to remind ourselves that the distinctions emerging
in the subsequent critical judgment upon the aesthetic experience are not
present in any such form within the experience itself. They first come to
clear consciousness within the grasp of reflection, although they are held in
solution, as it were, within the aesthetic moment. In this they are like
qualities or elements of ''pure sensation," which are also merely implicit
in the immediate situation, and are isolated and abstracted only through
deliberate intellectual analysis. Both are in a sense abstractions, "arte-
facts," methodological instruments as truly as are atoms and ether waves,
not given in the immediate perceptual or aesthetic experience, and not
possessing an independent existential character.

The fact that detailed analysis of the aesthetic experience is possible
only through subsequent judgments of introspection does not mean that
many and many a previous judgment has not gone into the making of the
aesthetic experience. Its richness of content implies that. Neither does
it mean that as immediate experience it is wholly devoid of judgmental
character. As feeling, as immediate sense of value, it is inherently judg-
mental, as all consciousness of meaning must be. But it is of the nature
of an "intuitive" or individual, rather than an instrumental or reflect-
ive judgment.^ It is a storehouse of past meanings, of which each has
lapsed as an independent end. In this sense the aesthetic experience
is "post-judgmental."^ But that does not mean that it is a mere "dead
judgment." It is, as we all know, a peculiarly alive sort of experience,
charged emotionally with the blended meanings of past judgments and
adjustments of all kinds. And this emotional charging means that the
experience is rich in materials for further judgments. If it be a store-
house, it is also a/magazine of meanings. But the judgments that it
touches oS are not the judgments that went into its making.

Accordingly, although the critical reflection upon the aesthetic experi-
ence must be carefully distinguished from the experience itself, and repre-
sents a kind of inquiry of late development in the race and in the indi-
vidual, its conclusions shed a flood of light upon the inner constitution of
that experience, and are of inestimable value, so long as we avoid confusing
the observer's with the experiencer's attitude, and assuming that the
' experience itself is a mere mosaic of the elements analyzed out of
it; in other words, avoid any of the forms of the psychologist's fallacy, to

I Dewey, Sttidies in Logical Theory, VI, pp. 134-42 (S. F. McLennan).

' Ibid., X, pp. 339, 340 (H. W. Stuart).

68 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

which we are fatally prontf in attempting to handle any kind of immediate
experience.

Of the distinctions thus brought to light, many have been elevated to the
position of independent "aesthetic categories," and a number lend them-
selves to clearest interpretation in terms of social psychology, thus connecting
closely with the present stage of our discussion. Among these are the
commonly accepted aesthetic criteria, which I have aheady touched upon in
Part I — such categories as wholeness, detachedness, objectivity, universality.
About the meaning of the objective and the subjective in aesthetics philoso-
phic controversy has gathered in all schools. Some of the difficulties, here
and elsewhere, arise from the tendency to treat problems too much in isola-
tion, and from the failure to observe the distinction between immediate
aesthetic experience and subsequent aesthetic criticism, or from the illegiti-
mate carrying-over of the results of the one into the description of the other.
Modern aesthetic theory has centered around the problems of the place and ^
function of the aesthetic in the relations of the individual and society; the \^
meaning of "aesthetic sympathy;" the aesthetic bearings of imitation, sug-
gestion, contagion, and the like; the relation of the "aesthetic object" to the
"social object" and the "physical object." Such topics as these last
obviously fall within the field of social psychology — a branch of inquiry the
importance of which for the solution of many vexing problems is just coming
to be recognized, and the materials and methods of which are becoming
defined with considerable exactness. An approach through these distinc-
tively social categories may serve to present the classic categories of objec-
tivity, subjectivity, etc., in a somewhat new light, and thus further our
inquiry more effectually than if we approached them directly.

In current psychology and social theory the old hard and fast opposition
between the individual and society has been broken down. The two are .
no longer thought of as fixed units in some sort of external and arbitrary J '
relation, but as two poles, or, better, two foci of experience, two reciprocal
and correlative phases of the social process." In the history of the race the
organization of society and the organization of the individual consciousness
have advanced together] acting and reacting on each other. Reflective
distinctions represent to a great extent the internalizing of distinctions
originally external and social — Plato's procedure in the Republic is a con-
spicuous instance of this, although its importance is not commonly recog-

I For recent statements of this view, cf. C. H. Cooley, Human Nature and the
Social Order, especially chaps, i, iii, v, vi;] and A. H. Lloyd, "The Organic Theory of
Society," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. VI, and "The Social Will," ibid.,
Vol. VIII.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 69

nized; and, on the other hand, the thinking individual reacts upon and
profoundly modifies social structure. Customs and institutions stand for
the established resources, the funded investments, of a society — in other
words, for its habits; the individual stands for its forward movement, its
ventures, its "growing-point" — in other words, for its focus of attention.
In early racial history, as we have seen, social structure and conscious
experiences alike were rudimentary and inchoate. In the processes of gain-
ing control over the immediate food-environment, group-coherence and
group-action were all important for preservation; individual initiative was
dangerous for the existence both of the group and of the individual ; and so
was rigidly repressed — or rather, failed to develop, since conditions were
inimical to such variation. In the predatory stage, however, a few objects,
chiefly animals and weapons, emerged for consciousness with considerable
distinctness, became pretty sharply individualized. They were still thought
of, however, as part of a man's total activity in a very close and real sense.
They had not yet split off into wholly independent and indifferent objects,
mere "things," tools for further operations, or in still more abbreviated
form, mere cues to definite and familiar action. As has been abundantly
shown in recent treatments of the problem, primitive man did not personify
inanimate objects in the sense of injecting human attributes into them; he
did not anthropomorphize in our sense of the term. He had not yet clearly
separated out either himself or his physical world from a sort of activity
continuum,^ Many of the things that are for us obvious physical, inanimate
objects were for him practically not objects at aU, but only imperfectly
defined stimulations to instinctive and impulsive action. The few that he
had built up into objects were still so fully the central points of his struggle
for existence that they were a part of his own personality, suffused with
an activity coloring.

On the side of the modern individual such an exposition as that of Bald-
win jreveals how fundamentally the individual self is the socius, the focus
point of interactions between his meager organic equipment and his social
world. This interaction, this constant play of stimulus and response, each
term of the equation serving now as one, now as the other, and in a sense
always functioning as both, continues as long as life lasts. It is Baldwin's
" dialectic " of the growth of the social self. But the stages are most obvious
in infancy and early childhood. Baldwin distinguishes the projective, the
subjective, and the ejective or fully social stage. In the first, certain of the
child's vague organic and impulsive reactions meet with definite response,

I Dewey, "Interpretation of Savage Mind," Psychological Review, Vol. IX, pp.
222, 223.

70 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

chiefly through the movements of persons ministering to its needs. Thus
arises |a vague sense of the distinction between persons and things — or,
rather, a rudimentary direction of the attention to persons as moving objects,
satisfyiiig organic cravings. Further, there dawns a sense of the irregularity
of personal responses. Sometimes people give the child what he wants;
sometimes they do not. This is the germ of the sense of agency, and is fol-
lowed by a growing awareness of difference among agents. In the second
or subjective stage, the child begins to control his own reactions with refer-
ence to these personal agents, and thus comes to recognition of himself
as agent, through an appropriation to himself of his sense of other persons.
In the third or ejective stage, he enlarges his notion of others by reflecting
back upon them his own experiences of activity, effort, and control. This
analysis does away with the older view that the individual's notion of others
is an inference, an indirect construction on the basis of his direct awareness
of himself. It establishes beyond a doubt that the consciousness of indi-
viduality, of self, is built up primarily through reaction to one's human
environment, and so is social from the first; that one knows others vaguely
as persons before one knows oneself as a person. Along with the growth of
the child's notions of persons grows his notions of things, as stimuli toward
which he can react with more unfailing regularity, upon which he can
depend. But this realization is of slower growth and for a long time subsi-
diary to his interest in persons. Through this distinction between persons
as agents and things as tools arises gradually the recognition of the distinc-
tion between body and mind, noticed first in others and then reflected back
into himself.^

Baldwin makes imitation in his sense of the term the method of this entire
growth, but a more satisfactory statement from our point of view is in terms
of the inhibition and working-over into wider co-ordinations of impulses,
through successful and unsuccessful responses to a stimulus, and, on the
external side, the gradual building-up of the stimulus into an organized object.
It thus results that the social self and its world are constructed at the same
time. One is, in fact, unthinkable without the other. It is important to
remember to how large a degree this early world is a world of persons.
Things that to adults are whoUy uniform in operation present all manner of
perversities to the child. The complexities of buttons, hooks, and strings
is a case in point. He slaps the door that pinches his finger, and says,
"Naughty door!" he punishes his toys that will not work. Just so'^the
savage finds all natural objects which he notices at all either hostile or

I Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes, pp. 1 7-20,
122-30, 334-48.

Ix

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 7 1

friendly to his group; even the Greeks within historic times had a court
for trying inanimate objects that had caused the death of anyone, and old
English law declared such objects forfeited and to be sold for the poor.^

While the processes of constructing the social self and the social and
physical world are infinitely more spontaneous, interrelated, and informal
than Baldwin's account suggests, yet it is sufl&ciently obvious that for both
the race and the individual experience is at first vaguely social or personal;
then more definitely in terms of a cluster of active agencies. Through
clashes and shortcomings among these agencies, necessitating a more diflfer-
entiated control, arises the more or less clear distinction between the physical
or material and the social, and a consciousness of the self as an agency over
against a world that it manipulates.

The physical object is thus in a sense an abstraction from the social
object. It is an object constructed originally for consciousness through
human effort and human interest. It is a plexus of personal attitudes and
relations. But its behavior is so regular, it can be counted on with such
certainty and reacted to with so little need of readjustment, that many of
its aspects drop away, particularly its agency aspect and its emotional nim-
bus, both of which indicate relative uncertainty as to modes of dealing with
it. With repeated use, it wears down in immediate experience to a symbol,
a signal for action. It becomes again a stimulus rather than an object,
although now a stimulus to a definite and co-ordinated response. When
it is seized upon as a means, an available tool, in effecting some further
reconstruction, grappling with some new problem, it regains again its
objective character. In the moment of scrutinizing it, of deciding whether
it is suitable for the purpose in hand, attention once more fastens upon it,
and it becomes for the flash once more a fully evolved physical object.^
If rejected or if used at once, its objectivity vanishes or reduces to a pin-
point in the total activity. Even more fully does it clothe itself afresh with
objectivity when it becomes itseff the subject, the focus of attention. But
this happens only when it is looked upon as a problem, when it has become
ambiguous as a cue to action; and in the course of reflection it is recon-
structed, becomes practically a new object.

This statement suggests a view that we are likely to overlook and that is
not brought out in Baldwin's account of the construction of the social self —
the view, namely, that the various constructive stages are not merely suc-
cessive in the first organization of experience, but are recurrent in every
process of reconstruction. When for any reason a portion of our world in
I E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, pp. 286, 287.
' Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory, X, pp. 247-57 (Stuart),

72 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

regard to which we have acted with assurance ceases to offer an unequivocal
guide to conduct, it may be said that it practically disappears temporarily,
leaving us in a state of mental groping, unpleasantly tinged emotionally, out
of which dawn the two positive centers of the self as managing the disturbed
situation and the end or object with reference to which one may ultimately
act freely. These two are at first held apart, but are gradually brought
together through a survey and employment of the various objects, data, or
means examined and found available. The moment of reconciliation, of
coalescence, is saturated with a consciousness of the renewed agreement of
the self and the situation. It marks the attainment of a new and more com-
plete reality. In such a reconstructive experience we have for the first
stage what approaches a state of pure subjectivity, the temporary disappear-
ance of all definite objective reference with regard to the specific interest on
hand. In the second stage we have the active "empirical self" over against
the "objects or data that it is handhng; and in the third stage we have the
identification of the self with the new object, and the blending of both self
and object in the total reality. Here we have an approximation to the ori-
ginal undifferentiated continuum, and to the original subjective and ejec-
tive stages. This last stage is what we have already called the "aesthetic
moment." It is now seen to be also the most entirely socialized moment in
consciousness, for it represents a harmony between the individual and his
world; and both are pre-eminently social. With the actual resumption of
outward action, and with repetition of such action, this moment is shorn of
much of its richness for consciousness. It sloughs off its peculiar social
and aesthetic character ; the object tends to become either a mere signal for
action, or again a mere means or physical object.^

So far, then, as I am able to state the matter to myself, the aesthetic object
from this point of view is the social object at its first moment of completed
construction, of richest significance. It represents the healing of the breach
between the self and the object, the culmination of the mediating processes,
an experience saturated with the feeling of satisfaction. It is therefore
reality in the fullest sense of the term. This aesthetic determination of
reality is social, and the converse may also be assumed to be true, that a
genuinely social determination of reality has always in it something of the
aesthetic.

In this connection, of course, I am using social with reference to the
make-up of consciousness at a particular moment, and not with reference
to the outward constitution and activities of society. To illustrate by a

I G. H. Mead, unpublished lectures, and "The Definition of the Psychical,*
University of Chicago Decennial Publications, Vol. Ill, especially pp. loo-ii.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 73

simple example the different types of objects of which I have been speaking:
If, on a country walk, the sight of a tree] leads me simply to deflect my
course in order to avoid it, it is a mere stimulus or cue to immediate habitual
action, not bulking in consciousness as an object in the true sense at all;
if I climb it to escape danger, or to obtain a wider outlook, or to gather nuts,
it becomes a physical object or means to an end; if I dwell with pleasure
upon the contemplation of it, it exists for me as an aesthetic object, the
core of an aesthetic experience. And it is social, [though I be alone and do
not give a thought to another human being, because it stirs up in me simul-
taneously a complex of incipient reactions toward it, tendencies toward
manifold possible ways of dealing with it. All of these are now inhibited
from discharge, limited to the organism, and in rhythmical relations to one
another. But as originally carried out they meant specific acts centering
about the tree, ways in which it was made to minister to human needs, oper-
ations which involved joint human action. Biicher has pointed out the
immense significance of co-operative manual labor in the development of
poetry and music; and the other arts are nearly as much in its debt. But
there are undoubtedly other occasions for co-operative movements; the
roots of such movements strike deeper into biologic history, and are more
delicately and finely interlaced than that. Kropotkin's Mutual Aid presents
a mass of data along this line. All that we can say with confidence of such
an experience as that of the aesthetic appreciation of the tree is that it lifts
consciousness to an emotional vividness otherwise attained only through
intercourse with persons. Our perception of the tree approximates the
warmth and intimacy of association with our kind under the most favorable
circumstances. There is a similar sense of enlargement of capacity, of
participating in the life and activities of another, of breaking down the
barriers that ordinarily hedge us in. All this, of course, is implicit and
unformulated at the time, but it is this aspect of the aesthetic experience,
however fancifully one is obliged to describe it,if^that lies at the base of the
assertion that aesthetic interest is always an interest in personality, in that
which is human or quasi-human.^ ) Aesthetic interest in mere things is
always unconsciously but inevitably guilty of the "pathetic fallacy." The
same idea is set forth in the often reiterated assertion that the aesthetic is
that which directly enhances the sense of life, since our fullest and most
characteristically human life is social. Berenson states it explicitly for
painting when he says that the human body is the most intensely and
directly life-communicating object, and so admits of the most entirely
aesthetic treatment." But the range of application of this view is far

I Henry Sturt, Personal Idealism, Essay VI, "Art and Personality."
^ I ' The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, pp. 84-88.

74 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

broader than that of any mere choice of subject. The aesthetic is social in
the fullest psychological sense of the term.

To say that the aesthetic experience is social is equivalent to saying
that a state of high pleasurable feeling is social, and this may be a hard
saying to those who hold that feeUng and emotion are essentially subjec-
tive and individual. Such a position ignores the social elements in solution,
at least, in all consciousness, and furthermore overlooks the undoubted fact
that emotion, particularly pleasurable emotion, presses toward expression —

f or, better, toward communication. It has been commonly said that joy,
satisfaction, are social emotions. And it is matter of daily experience
that a state of gratification or elation does not come to fruition until we
have communicated it to somebody else. Painful emotion, too, seeks
relief in one of two ways: either by the direct, and one may call it the
cheap and easy, mode of communication to others, or by the indirect mode
of repression and consequent translation into thought. It may be argued
that even in this case there is a division of selves that may be interpreted as
social and involving communication.] Professor Scott, of the University
of Michigan, has recently maintained the thesis that prose is expression
for communication's sake, poetry is communication for expression's sake."
Without giving or examining his argument, which has many points of
interest, I should like to paraphrase his statement thus: The non-aesthetic
is communication for cognition's sake; the aesthetic is communicaton for
emotion's sake. Both thinking and feeling involve communication, lead
to action. We have long accepted James's dictum that all consciousness
is motor; we perhaps do not recognize so clearly that(1:he most important
phases of that action have reference to our fellow-men, so that we can truly

' say also that all consciousness is social. It is true that thought reaches
communication and a social result by a less direct path than does emotion.
In its essence it is analytic, mediatory, individual, but its goal is neverthe-
less a social goal. Its purpose is to make possible a better, more efficient
type of social action. Emotion gains its social goal by a straighter path.
As emotion, it is evanescent; it pushes toward something else. In the case
of the artist the urge toward communication inherent in a large volume
of pleasurable emotion is intense enough and specific enough to lead to
actual creative construction, both completing and controlling itself thereby.
In the aesthetic experience of less intensity, as in the case of the spectator,
the appreciator, the impulse to communication is less concentrated, tends
more to diffused discharge; it may exhaust itself in a vague sense of
emotional unison with the artist, with the immediate social world, with
^ Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. XIX, No. X.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 75

humanity at large. It perhaps rarely comes to a head in a definite type
of social action, though it undoubtedly serves as a directive agency in
the various affairs of everyday life. If cherished for its own sake, such
an emotional attitude runs into sentimentairsm. It is against such emo-
tional self-indulgence that James humorously warns us when he says:
"The remedy would be, never to suffer oneself to have an emotion . . . .
without expressing it afterward in some active way. Let the expression
be the least thing in the world — speaking genially to one's aunt, or giving
up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic offers — but let it not
fail to take place."

With all their differences both the reflective and the aesthetic experi-
ences stand for the dwelling upon a situation made up of various elements.
Neither is merely a point of transition to a new attitude. But whereas
the situation calling for reflection has fallen into disarray, contains jostling
elements, necessitating selective, indicative attention, oscillating between
aspects in the effort to reconcile them in the light of some recognized end,
the aesthetic situation presents the various elements within it functioning
in harmony, and holds attention absorbed by their rich interplay. This
dwelling of the attention upon the situation, this realization of the object
to the full with the least fatigue and distraction, has been pointed out as
the psychological essence of the aesthetic experience. Vernon Lee puts
it thus in her rhapsodical fashion: "Beauty is born of attention, as happi-
ness is born of life, because attention is rendered difficult and painful by
lack of harmony, even as life is clogged, diminished, or destroyed by pain.
.... Beauty of no kind whatever, nor in any art, can really exist for
the inattentive, for the overworked, or for the idle."^ And Groos says:
"The difference between appearance in general and aesthetic appearance
is in effect an intensive difference. The first serves; the second governs;
one is fugitive; the other holds us captive."* In any such statement, how-
ever, of the aesthetic experience as a case of absorbed or spontaneous atten-
tion, it is essential to remember that attention is not to be thought of as a
special outside agency or activity brought to bear upon the situation. The
co-operation of many activities in rhythmic equilibrium is that conscious
state that we call absorbed attention, just as the gradual readjustment
of disturbed activities in the reflective situation is voluntary, indicative
attention.

Looking at the aesthetic experience as a bundle of incipient social
reactions, we find some light on the phenomena that have been discussed

I "Art and Usefulness," II, Contemporary Review, Vol. LXXX.

' EinleUung in die Aesthetik, p. 443.

76 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

under the terms "aesthetic sympathy," "suggestion," "contagion" or
"infection," and the like. I have set forth earher in this paper the theory
that the object stands for the partial inhibition and interrelation of the
various responses once made directly to it as a stimulus, and that the
aesthetic experience stands for the fullest possible simultaneous excitation
of these old tendencies to response. This is literally a " f eeling-with " the
object, an actual present experience, in diminished form, of sundry ten-
sions, stresses, and strains of the body which contributed to its original
construction and definition. In space perception, markedly in the space-
arts, it becomes Berenson's "sense of tactile values,"^ a stirring of the
innumerable tactual-motor sensations that have gone into the building of
our perceptions of solidity, of three-dimensional space. This "inner
movement " was pointed out long ago by Adam Smith, and made the basis
of his general theory of sympathy. ' It has been refined upon by modem
psychologists, and described as an "inner imitation" of the form and
"pattern" of a work of art, sometimes directly through actually aroused
organic movements, sometimes indirectly through the excitation of the
appropriate motor images. Without going into the question whether
motor imagery does not always mean actual incipient movement or into

i\the other question as to how far the motor element enters in the case of
-. I jthose whose imagery is dominantly visual or auditory, we may admit

( beyond a doubt that a large part of the aesthetic experience consists in the
stirring of a motor complex, made up probably both of actual bodily strains
and tensions, a general organic resonance, and of motor asociations. In
all these views the object is taken for granted as aheady there, a "given;"
and these motor reactions are considered as occurring subsequent to the
immediate apprehension, and not as involved in the construction of the
aesthetic object, a constituent part of the total aesthetic experience. Such
aesthetic sympathy, accomplished through "inner imitation" or other-
wise, may be described either as an entering of the object into the organic
life of the individual, or as a passing-over of the individual's organic life
into the object. The phrasing is indifferent. What is meant in both
cases is that the two are blended in a peculiarly intimate way.

These theories deal chiefly or exclusively with the direct relation between
the artist or the appreciator and the work of art in the immediate aesthetic
experience; but they lend themselves to social interpretation, in the objec-
tive sense of the term as distinguished from the sense in which I have
used it with reference to the social character of the individual conscious-
' Florentine Painters, pp. 3-12.

^ I « Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Sec. i, chap. i.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 77

ness. From this point of view the work of art is the carrier, the go-between,
in the communication of the experience of the artist to his public. As stand-
ing for a large number of reactions, bound together in an emotional whole,
it is a center of social radiations, of suggestions, and as such touches off a
variety of responses. This high social potentiality has also a sort of resur-
gent effect upon the artist, heightening the emotional tone of the original
experience. It is because the work of art binds together in itself so many
tendencies ripe for discharge and held together by mutual reinforcement
that its suggestiveness is so intense and stirs a mass of similar tendencies
in others, putting them into the social attitude. Tolstoi tiius describes
what he calls the "infectiousness" of art.

The receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels
as if the work were his own and not someone else's — as if what it expresses were
just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys in
the consciousness of the receiver the separation between himself and the artist;
nor that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of
art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this
uniting it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force
of art.'

Far as such a statement is from being an adequate account of the aesthe-
tic or from explaining the mechanism of this process of "infection," it calls
attention eloquently to the significant part played by the aesthetic, espe-
cially in its developed form as a work of art, in enlarging and deepening
the social consciousness. The function of art in society is only just now
coming to be investigated, although it has been heralded by such prophets
as Ruskin, Wagner, Morris, and Tolstoi. Whatever is potent in social-
izing consciousness is certainly worthy of regard from all those who hope
for a better and a richer life for both society and the individual.

We are now at a point where we can return with profit to the aesthetic
categories of detachedness or non-utility, subjectivity, objectivity, and
universality. /We have seen that the aesthetic experience is one of large
comprehensiveness and high value for consciousness. It represents the
incorporation into an organized unity of many previously achieved co-
ordinations or ends. This totality, this unity, make it pre-eminently of
the type of immediate experience. It does not fall apart for him who is
living it into a consideration of means and ends, subject or self, and object
to be attained. In it consciousness is not self-consciousness. The ques-
tions, then, of its utiHtarian or non-utilitarian character, its subjectivity
or objectivity, long and ardently as they have been discussed, are hardly

I What Is Art ? (Crowell ed.), p. 153.

78 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

valid in a discussien of the aesthetic as immediate and distinctive experi-
ence. Within the genuinely aesthetic situation consciousness does not
become bipolar. It is active, but integral. There is no awareness of
purpose, because there is no holding of one end apart as something not
yet attained and to be sought. There is a disposition rather toward ful-
filling many ends that have been drawn within the radius of the one situa-
tion, have become constituents of the single experience. These many ends,
since they cannot all be carried out simultaneously, hold one another in
the mutual checking that characterizes emotion. But since they do not
collide or eliminate one another, they contribute a high sense of activity
and of pleasantness to the total. The outside observer and student of the
experience can see that the experience is of the utmost importance in the
recurrent processes of winning control over new situations. It is highly
purposive from the point of view of both stimulation and unification. But
recognition of this is not a part of the conscious experience of the person in
the aesthetic attitude. The same thing is true of the distinction between
subject and object. It remains for the observer, but is swallowed up for
the experiencer, if I may use the word. His attention is engrossed by the
aesthetic object; nothing for the moment leads him to put himself in any
way over against it; the scope and degree of the bodily and mental pro-
cesses involved are registered in the suffused sense of vital enhancement,
satisfaction, interest. To say that the aesthetic is partly subjective because
of its strong coloring of pleasurable activity is to say that all especially
full and satisfying experiences are subjective. And that is not commonly
admitted. It is, indeed, an illegitimate transfer to carry over terms origin-
ating in a purely intellectualistic analysis of the aesthetic to the description
of a situation made up of predominantly active and emotional elements.

The fact, to which Professor Tufts calls attention, that aesthetic pleasure
especially when one is dealing with a relatively unfamiliar art field or art
product, "is not always objectified, but .... wavers between the sub-
jective and the objective," finds explanation, to my mind, not so much in
the passing from a private or individual to a social standard of value, as in
the rapid oscillation between an aesthetic and a non-aesthetic or critical
attitude. "I like it," instead of "This is fine," seems to indicate a tentative
and partial identification with the situation rather than absorption in it, a
hesitating comparison of personal standards with others, in other words, an
attitude of mind that approximates the reflective rather than the genuinely
or completely aesthetic attitude.^

The objectivity — or, since that word is correlative with subjectivity,

I Op. cit., pp. 7, 8.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 79

and both apply to the disturbed situation, more properly speaking, the
reality — of the aesthetic, is, as I have maintained, essentially social in its
implications and efifects. It is in connection with this social character
of the aesthetic that the category of universality gets more than a merely
formal significance. With reference to the immediate aesthetic situation
or experience, the term may be used to cover all the social possibilities and
opportunities latent in the aesthetic, the sense of communion and communi-
cability that it carries with it. But in the experience itself the "judgment
of universality" is emotional, not reflective. In any formulated intellec-
tual statement, this judgment is, of course, the product of subsequent
aesthetic criticism, looking at the results of the immediate experience. And
even in this case it does not involve a belief that the aesthetic experience
will be participated in necessarily by all who come within the range of
"infection."

A brief statement and criticism may conveniently be made at this point
of the various modem theories of the aesthetic experience already mentioned
in this discussion. The standpoint of them all is implicitly or avowedly

I *^\ social, as I have used the term, although some of them seem to confuse
the results of the experience with the experience itself — the fallacy referred
to at the beginning of this section. They are all, furthermore, distinc-

I -ft Itively psychological as opposed to philosophical or "metaphysical;" and
" uphold with greater or less vigor the "activity" position, though they
derive it, so far as I can make out, from biological considerations rather
than from any consistently functional view of psychology in general. That
is, they do not bring out the essentially reconstructive character of experi-
ence, and are inclined to look upon the aesthetic object as a bare "given."
They are divided into two groups, according to whether they make the
expression of emotion or certain types of activity predominant in their
explanation of the aesthetic experience. This is, however, a dijBference of
stress rather than an absolute difference in theory. Another type of theory
affiliating with both these views is that represented by the characterization
of the aesthetic as "conscious self-illusion" or "as self-exhibition."

The "expression of emotion" theories, as put forth by Bosanquet,
Marshall, and Him, alike mean by "expression" far more than mere
discharge, mere draining off of a mass of indeterminate reactions. They
assume an organization, an objectification of the emotion. We attach it
to an object with which we become temporarily identified. Bosanquet
thus describes the aesthetic experience.

In proportion as through continued attention we are seized by the special
delight or emotion which the perception in question has power to produce, ....

^

8o THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

we depart from the attitude of the mere spectator, and assume that of the mind
which is impelled to expression and utterance, the mind of the "maker." That is
to say, we no longer feel ourselves in face of the presentation as something given
ab extra, but rather enter into it as something which embodies for us the emotion
that craves utterance. This emotion, of course, the presentation has itself in
the commonest instances occasioned. But none the less, when we enjoy it fully,
we seem to have made the presentation transparent and organic through and
through.^

Here we have a strong suggestion of the aesthetic as an active, constructive
experience. Bosanquet saysjnothing directly of the origin of the aesthetic
nor of its social nature, but he may be said to hint at its social side, in one
sense at least, when he says:

Much of the foregoing argument .... could be summed up by saying that
aesthetic emotion is "impersonal." But the word is a dangerous one .... I
should prefer to borrow the expression of a recent writer on a different subject,
and call it "super-personal." In becoming aesthetic, emotion does not become
something less, but something more; it does not forfeit the depth of personality,
but only throws oflf its narrowness, and modifies it by an enlargement which is also
a reinforcement.*

This objectification of an emotion Bosanquet calls "expression for expres-
sion's sake" — a phrase which strikes me as misleading in two ways; first,
as not differentiating aesthetic emotion from other types, and, second,
as hinting at a conscious purpose inhering in the experience. But this
may be reading into it difficulties that are not there.

Both Marshall and Hirn ground the aesthetic experience upon a
so-called "aesthetic instinct" or "impulse." Marshall calls it the impulse
to attract through the pleasing of others.3 Hirn says:

The art impulse in its broadest sense must be taken as an outcome of the
natural tendency of every feeling-state to manifest itself externally, the effect of such
a manifestation being to heighten the pleasure and to relieve the pain. We found
in this fact the prunary source of art as an individual impulse. But art is essen-
tially social .... The secondary effect of the exteriorization of a feeling -state
is to awaken similar feelings in other human beings who perceive the manifestation
and their sympathetic feeling acts upon the author of the original manifestation,
heightening in him the feeling-state which gave rise to it.*

In both these statements we find a social reference, ) more explicit in
Hirn. Just what Marshall means by a "blind impulse" to attract by
I "On the Nature of Aesthetic Emotion," Mind, N. S., Vol. Ill, p. 155.
a Ibid., p. 165.

3 Pain, Pleasure, and Aesthetics, pp. 100, 102-4.

4 The Origins of Art, p. 302.

UNIVERSITY

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 8 1

pleasing — for he is careful to insist that there is no forecast of the end —
it is impossible for me to make out. The phrasing seems to necessitate
the presence of some dim idea of the end. Without it the tendency in ques-
tion reduces itself to a general impulse toward sociality, toward human
intercourse, and the statement apparently means that such impulses are
agreeable. I cannot acquit Marshall of a confusion here between the
immediate experience and subsequent analysis of that experience. And
if his statement has at all the meaning that I have read into it, the impulse
to attract by pleasing lies at the root of all social organization and produc-
tion, and cannot therefore be said to be peculiarly aesthetic. Marshall
sets up a criterion in his definition of the aesthetic as ''the relatively
permanently pleasurable in revival."^ This is, of course, a distinction
legitimately made from the observer's standpoint. It may perhaps be
taken as equivalent to the criterion of objectivity as understood by San-
tayana, or translated into our formula of the establishment of a complex
co-ordination, the attainment of an extraordinary depth and width of con-
trol. But this imports into it assumptions that Marshall does not consider.

Hirn's "art impulse" may also be criticized as too broad to serve as
\ the origin of one particular type of experience. The tendency of feeling-
states to seek an outlet is fundamental in all organisms of any degree of
complexity, and an account of the various ways in which such discharge
is deflected and mediated is an account of all the forms of mental activity.
Hirn himself recognizes this, but maintains that art best serves and satis-
fies this impulse, which seems to me another question.* From the posi-
tion that I am seeking to maintain, any such derivation of the aesthetic
experience from a special primordial "aesthetic impulse" is unnecessary
and even misleading. The aesthetic represents a certain degree and kind
of co-operation among various activities ; it does not derive from any one
type; and it represents an advanced and not a primitive kind of reaction.

Hirn, furthermore, tends to think of pleasure and pain as directly
causal rather than as accompaniments of certain forms of activity, and
fails to assign them to a distinct place and function within the total act.3
In describing the communication of the externalized feeling-state to others,
and its reflection from them back into the consciousness of the individual
first experiencing the emotion, he makes use of the theories of "inner
imitation" as the mechanism for the spread of the feeUng and its resiir-
gence upon its originator, thus borrowing from the upholders of the activity

I Op. ciL, p. 355-
=" Op. cit., p. 73.
3 Ibid., chap. iii.

82 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

theories.^ I do not find that Hirn states anywhere that the social reaction
upon the original feeling may come to be an essential part associatively
and imaginatively in the further aesthetic experiences of the artist, and
not remain only an actual secondary effect. But he makes the social
response and enhancement essential to the genuine aesthetic experience;
and dwells upon the "cathartic" and controlling effect of such objectifica-
tion.2 Hirn's treatment of the problem of the aesthetic experience is,
on the whole, the most fresh and suggestive of recent years; and makes
illuminating use of anthropologic and genetic material.

The activity theories are represented by the Germans Karl Groos and
Theodor Lipps and their followers, who advance respectively the theories
of inner imitation, innere Nachahmung, and Einfuhlung, for which no
^ \ satisfactory English equivalent has been found, but which means literally
- ' a '*feeling-into" a thing. The general position of both was anticipated
incidentally by many of the older writers on aesthetics, but lacked psycho-
logical and experimental confirmation. Of recent years it has been taken
independently by two art critics, Vernon Lee and Bernhard Berenson in
their case applied only to the space arts. The main contention of these
theories I have already set forth. Both lay chief stress on the activities
excited in the appreciation of an aesthetic object. Groos emphasizes the
actual reproduction in the spectator of the movements entering into the
- I construction or the manipulation of the object. These movements take
- ' place, for the most part, in reduced form within the body, as "organic
movements," although frequently externalized, as in keeping time to music,
involuntarily assuming the postures taken by an actor or a statue. He
recognizes that tendencies to movement may be excited through images of
similar movements of our own in the past; but he holds that associations
alone are not sufficient to account for our lively sense of co-operation with
the object in the aesthetic experience, amounting in many cases to com-
plete temporary identification with it. He calls this actual internal sym-
pathetic movement imitation, although he admits that it is not literal, but
only abbreviated and symbolic representation. 3

Lipps's theory of Einfuhlung, or aesthetic sympathy, differs from
Groos' s theory of "inner imitation" more in the way of emphasis than
' through any actual unlikeness of position, at least so far as the unenlight-
ened reader can tell. The two men have, however, asserted their points

' Op. cit., chap. vi.
» Ibid., chaps., iv, viii.

3 The Play of Man (translated by E. L. Baldwin), pp. 322-31; Der aesthetische
Genuss, chap. v.

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 83

of difference with true German copiousness and minuteness. Lipps
insists upon the immediate identification of the beholder with the thing
beheld, the aesthetic object, an entering into its life and activity with a
vividness and actuality comparable to what would be felt if the center of
interest were in one's person. He admits fully that the ability to enter
into such sympathetic relations with the aesthetic object is dependent on
rj^l our own experiences of similar activities; but makes the essence of the
► ~ matter the immediate and unreflective objectification and transfer of the
sense of activity. There is absolutely no recognition, he says, of the activity
as mine, as located in my body ; it cannot, therefore, justly be called inner
imitation. It is the momentary living of the life of the thing with which
I am in aesthetic relations. He further maintains that the "stuff" of this
transferred experience is primarily neither sensations nor images of organic
movements, but rather the activity of the will, Willenshandlung, the con-
sciousness of ''inner experience" or Tun. "Das 'Tun,'" he says, "ist
uberall an sich ein rein inneres Erlebnis. Und es ist uberall dasselbe
innere Erlebnis." To take up the view of the will here imported into the
discussion is, of course, entirely outside of our purpose. Lipps agrees
with Berenson that the human form is the most directly stimulating to
our sense of life, the occasion of the most complete Einfuhlung, and there-
fore of the fullest aesthetic experience. "Man is not beautiful," he says,
"because of his form. The human form is beautiful because it is to us
the carrier of human life.'"'

While neither of these theories makes much of the emotional or the
social aspects of the aesthetic experience, they both imply them. Lipps,
particularly, with his insistence upon the engrossment of the experiencer in
the aesthetic object, the unity of the aesthetic experience vividly described
what we have called the "pause of satisfaction," and reveals, perhaps
unintentionally, its social character and potentialities.
* J '' Baldwin's " self -exhibition " theory is given cursory treatment in his
Social and Ethical Interpretations, and disclaims adequacy.* He brings
the aesthetic experience under his general doctrine of imitation, in which,
as is well known, he includes the phenomena of growth, accommodation,
as well as of habit. The urgent tendency of a new accommodation, he
says, is to complete itself in an act. This is the self -exhibition impulse, the
constructive or creative tendency on the part of the individual. Such
exhibition, however, does not become the work of art, according to Baldwin,
until it has received social confirmation, acceptance, and approbation
I Grundlegung der Aesthetik, p. 105; cf. whole discussion of £i»/tlW«ng, pp. 96-223.
' Pp. 147-53-

84 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

by others.y He does not tell us the character of this social confirmation or
judgment, nor how it is reflected back into the original activity. There
seems here the ambiguity that lurks in the position of Him. The social
element is made subsequent, not integral. Moreover, the self-exhibiting
impulse is for Baldwin a part of all accommodations and inventions; and
the social judgment is the test of their success or failure. ) His theory
accordingly, so far as developed, offers apparently no criterion for the dis-
crimination of the aesthetic from other types of invention. He does, indeed,
say that "aesthetic inventions are new dispositions of thought viewed as a
arousing emotion and sentiment," thus indicating the emotional aspects
of the question. But he does not enlarge upon this. His theory serves
merely to call attention to the activity and social sides of the aesthetic
experience.

Lange's "conscious self-illusion" theory may be dismissed with a 1*^
few words. He asserts that in the aesthetic experience there are simul-
taneously present in consciousness two different contents or ideas — one of
the actuality of the aesthetic appearance, or Schein, the other that it is,
after all, only illusion, Tduschung, a human construction. If the illusion
of actuality were complete, he says, we should be in positive error; but
since we recognize that the presentation is Schein, the experience has the
character of playful rather than of serious illusion. He points out the
element of illusion in non-aesthetic experiences, and makes the awareness
of it while having the experience the criterion of the aesthetic. Lange's
characterization of consciousness as dual in the aesthetic moment is hard to
reconcile with the position taken by modem psychology as to the unity and
immediacy of the aesthetic consciousness. What he probably means to
indicate is that we do not confuse our aesthetic identification with an object,
with actual external putting ourselves into its place, participating in its
activities. To use Lipps's illustration, when we enter aesthetically into
the experiences of the trapeze performer or of the dancer, we do not actually
believe that we are swinging on the trapeze or dancing,. To point out
this fact is merely to assert that the aesthetic is an independent experience,
having its own "coefficient of recognition." Otherwise we could not
discuss it any more than we could discuss memories and images if we could
not distinguish them from the perceptual experiences out of which they
arose. In any other sense than this the discrimination of two ideas in the
aesthetic experience involves the psychologist's fallacy of reading back
into the immediate situation the distinctions reflectively analyzed out of it.
It is undoubtedly true that a prevailing character of the aesthetic is its
instabiUty, the rapidity with which one shifts from the aesthetic into the

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 85

reflective attitude, and becomes aware of the "illusion." But such
moments of criticism do not belong in any true sense to the aesthetic
experience itself, which is an absorption in the total situation without
characterizing it as either real or not real. Lange's recognition of the
presence of Schein in non-aesthetic experiences seems to show that he
looks upon all presentations as constructions rather than as mere "givens."
He practically makes it equivalent to the apperceptive or ideational
aspect of all perception. But how far he would subscribe to this I do not
know.^

His characterization of the bewusste SelbsUduschung in the aesthetic
as playful aligns Lange with. Groos in his famous "play theory" of the
aesthetic. First suggested in an aesthetic connection by Schiller,; as is well
known, and given a scientific basis by Spencer, the theory of play in gen-
eral has received great reinforcement and confirmation through Groos's
view that play is not a result merely of surplus energy, a sort of evolutionary
by-product, as Spencer held, but a valuable life-function, preserved through
natural selection to afford preliminary exercise and development of responses
useful in later life. Valuable as this change of basis is for. the explanation
of play in general, it is difficult to see how the aesthetic can be brought
under such a generalization,/ if, indeed, it wholly accounts for adult play.
Groos, however, stretches his definition of play. "When an act is per-
formed solely because of the pleasure it affords, there is play."* But this
seems to set up pleasure as an outside end, and involves us in the traditional
hedonistic ambiguities as well as detracting from the spontaneous char-
acter of play as an inherited impulse. It is in their common spontaneity,
freedom from compulsion, engrossment in the present situation, that Groos
finds his reasons for identifying play and the aesthetic experience. Both
involve Schein, illusion; but in many kinds of play and in the fullest aes-
thetic experience the temporary participation in the experience is entire and
genuine. Groos also points out the social nature and value of play as
fostering the impulses toward association and communication, and as
supplying a basis for serious social co-operation in later life. He also
touches upon the social significance of art, although he asserts that it is
through its social aims that art diverges from play. Here, of course he
brings in his inner imitation as a mechanism. He appears to find the social
element in the aesthetic in the conscious aim of attracting others, and
subscribes to Baldwin's self-exhibition theory.

1 Die bewusste SelbsUduschung als Kern des kunstlerischen Genusses (1895); Das
Wesen der Kunst (1901), especially chap. viii.

2 The Play of Man, pp. 394, 395.

86 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

One remark thrown out by Groos strikes me as particularly sane and
particularly pertinent to our discussion of the aesthetic. He says that in
considering the origins of play it is not necessary to assume a special play
instinct. There are, rather, a large number of instincts, impulses to act
in a particular way toward specific stimulations, all of which may be exer-
cised playfully.^ We may borrow from this support for our view that
the presumption is in favor of there being no one primordial "aesthetic
instinct," such as Hirn and Marshall assume. The truth seems rather
to be that our whole equipment of instincts, impulses, and organized
responses* may under appropriate conditions contribute to the aesthetic
experience.^ To my mind, play and the aesthetic are alike chiefly because
both are modes of immediate experience. I find it, however, truer to
fact to say that play may become aesthetic than to say that the aesthetic is a
kind of play. I; The aesthetic marks a certain stage and kind of organiza-
tion in any experience. It cannot therefore be identified with any one
particular^type of experience. In successful play there are undoubtedly
aesthetic aspects and moments; but it does not ordinarily rise to a high
aesthetic^level.^^The activities involved are too few, the co-ordinations too
incomplete, the responses too much of the serial character.

I ThejPlay of_Man, pp. 377, 378.

k

PART III

SPECIFIC AESTHETIC CATEGORIES AND TYPES OF AESTHETIC
EXPERIENCE

I. THE SPECIFIC AESTHETIC CATEGORIES

In this part I do not undertake to suggest solutions of the many specific
problems falling under the general rubric of aesthetics. My purpose is
rather to point out the locus of these specific problems in the account
^already given. Even the broadest survey of the field of aesthetics cannot
afford to ignore entirely the time-honored categories of unity in variety,
symmetry, proportion, harmony, rhythm, economy, the characteristic, and
the rest of the train; nor such distinctive aspects of the aesthetic as the
beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the tragic, and the comic. Quail as one
may before their portentous backing of controversial Uterature, one is com-
pelled to fit a pebble into the sling and have at them. If by so doing I
reinforce my general position, I shall be entirely satisfied. I shall not
attempt to discuss, except in the most incidental way, the peculiar aesthe-
tic quality of the various concrete arts — music, painting, sculpture, archi-
tecture, etc. — although each sets its own problems, and offers an alluring
field of investigation. _ _

The most cursory examination of^tHe^ aesthetic categories reveals the
fact that they have accumulated in ^ haphazard fashion, and represent
widely different lines of approach. The so-called "formal categories'""'
are obviously derived from a study of the work of art rather than of the
aesthetic experience. They are logical, not psychological, having to do
with the product apart from the process. / Some are drawn from one art ^
form, some from another. Thus, symmetry, balance, and proportion
suggest most directly the "space arts;" rhythm and harmony, the "time
arts." Another set of terms, more recent in the literature of the aesthetic,
shows the attempt to analyze the immediate aesthetic situation. Here
belong economy, restraint, novelty in familiarity, "the characteristic,"
"the significant," some referring to the total effect with emphasis upon
the content side, some to the modes of producing it. Modern psychology
is seeking to subject the phenomena underlying both sets of terms to
investigation and to experimental verification. But the complexity and
the notorious elusiveness of the aesthetic experience render such procedure
slow and difficult. In the use of these terms there is considerable over-
lapping. Some are but different names for the same phenomena.

87

^o

|yiila;

88 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

The two terms most widely and continuously used in discussions of the
'^aesthetic have been "unity" and ''variety." The aesthetic object, it is
said, always involves unity in variety. The aesthetic experience is aware-
i^ness of such unity in variety. Without further limitation, such statement
means nothing even as description of the aesthetic, for it applies equally
well to any sort of organized and objectified experience. Moreover, we have
come to recognize that in any connection either term by itself stands for
an unthinkable situation. Mere empty unity is as impossible as mere brute
variety. To be aware of unity is to be aware of the unity of something; to
be aware of variety is to be aware of it as embodied in a concrete something,
and thus within the grasp of unity. In terms of control, unity emphasizes
the achievement of control, something that we can deal with as a total;
variety emphasizes the various materials used and stages gone through in
the process of achieving that control. Control means co-ordination, organi-
zation. It necessarily connotes things brought together. Unity represents
the end; variety the means available for bringing about that end. Both
notions emerge as objects of thought only in a distvurbed situation. They
re categories of reflective, not of immediate, experience. It is entirely
true, however, that reflective analysis of particular unity-in- variety situations
will bring to light different component parts and different arrangements
of the content in which we read off these terms. The content and pattern
of one unity-in-variety situation may be meager, of another rich. There
are all degrees and kinds of unity in variety. Just what they are is the
problem of the distinctive types of concrete experience.

One kind of unity in variety we undoubtedly find in the aesthetic
experience when we subject it to analysis. Beyond such analysis much aes-
thetic theory has not gone; and it gives us the various aesthetic cate-
fgories read off in terms of unity in variety. If we keep in mind that neither
group is really understandable without the other, we may safely say that
the formal categories fall into two groups, according as they lay chief stress
_ on the concept of unity or on the concept of variety. Ancient thought was
more impressed with the unity of the work of art. Modern thought, finding
a richer content in its art products and taking more interest in processes,
Hn activity, has dwelt on the concept of variety. Into the first group fall
such categories as symmetry, proportion, balance, harmony, simplicity;
into the second, such categories as order, rhythm, contrast, reconciliation
'|sOf opposites. One group calls attention to the total effect, the wholeness,
^completeness, togetherness, of the aesthetic object as apprehended in the
aesthetic experience; the other calls attention to its richness, fulness, intri-
[ cacy of subordinate arrangement. We may go so far as to say that atten-

SPECIFIC AESTHETIC CATEGORIES 89

\ tion to one aspect will give us a predominating sense of relief, repose — the
"cathartic" effect of the aesthetic; the other will give us a predominating
^ sense of enhancement of life, of stimulation.

But we no sooner get the two sets of categories apart for the sake of
descriptive convenience than we have to bring them together again in
discussing any one of them. All the terms that we have ranged under
unity obviously mean nothing more than a certain disposition within the
whole, of the constituent elements revealed to analysis. Symmetry, for
instance, means a certain mutual interrelation of parts giving a specific char-
acter to the whole. The same thing holds true of the other categories of
unity. They must be interpreted in terms of the categories of variety.
On the side of variety, the specific categories are even more dependent upon
the concept of unity, allying themselves with one or another of its categories.
Thus order becomes a term of aesthetic significance, not merely when
thought of as order of parts with reference to a whole — it has no meaning
whatever apart from that — but as order of a particular kind, arrange-
ment according to a pattern, involving symmetry, harmony, proportion,
etc. Contrast, too, is always within a whole. There is no possibility
of it for consciousness between two things that are not in some sort of
relation. But in itself it does not make an experience aesthetic. There
are all sorts of non-aesthetic contrasts. Again there must be co-operating
and defining factors of balance, symmetry, etc. Rhythm is the most
definitely aesthetic of the single categories I have named as falling under
the concept of variety, and plays an increasingly important part in the
literature of aesthetic theory. It, too, of course, has meaning only with
reference to a whole; and even it names an experience that, unless it con-
forms to certain conditions, is likely to become monotonous and positively
displeasing aesthetically. All this merely goes to show that to treat these
categories in isolation, and aside from further investigation of specific
aesthetic situations, is a profitless shuflBing of counters, leading to no real
explanation and likely to entangle in barren discussion of the relation of
the One to the Many. The aesthetic experience, at its best, is highly con-
crete and distinctive, with a solid core in the aesthetic object; and the
categories find their point of attachment and their chance for elucidation
within it and not in abstraction from it.

This concrete aesthetic experience I have described as the embrace
within one comprehensive co-ordination of a large group of synchronous
minor activities. Under such conditions the unity attained and felt is
active, functional, not passive, static. Within the area of organization
there is a constant shift and play of activity, and a corresponding sense

^A

90 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

of interest, fulness, life. The large co-ordination is exceedingly delicate,
and is able to maintain itself only through constant tensions and resolu-
tions, changes and compensations, among the various motor elements
involved. The more elaborate such a system of balanced forces, the
more delicate the equilibrium and the greater the necessity for continual
redistribution of strains. It is impossible to avoid using physical terms
here, though in dealing with psychical matters they are employed figura-
tively rather than literally. The aesthetic situation as a whole may persist
for a considerable length of time; but it does so, not as a static whole, but
by virtue of a series, or many interwoven series, of compensations and sub-
stitutions.

It is in terms of these combinations and redistributions, these various
tensions and relaxations, that the categories of unity and variety must be
interpreted, if they are to have any genuine value for aesthetic theory. -

With regard to the character of the activities thus contributing to the
experience as a whole, we can, at the present state of our knowledge say no
more than that they comprise, with little doubt, the established organic
rhythms of breathing, heart-beat, fatigue and recuperation, making up
normally the remoter fringe of any consciousness, the more obscure physi-
ological rhythms of innervation, anabolis and katabolis, etc., not enter-
ing into consciousness at all, and the psychological rhythm of attention and
its attendant operations. When all these fall into certain relations, and
reinforce one another, we have, not their mere fusion or summation, but
a new thing, the aesthetic experience.

This experience, unitary as it is for consciousness, not only represents
an incessant flicker of change among its complex constituents, but also
admits of diversity in the character of those constituents themselves./ It
is matter of common observation that experiences which feel alike may
show upon examination quite different elements. It is the width and
pattern of the resultant whole rather than the nature of the particular
minor activities bound up in it that produce the aesthetic situation. And
yet it is the differences in the elements that at least partly account for the
individual character of different types of aesthetic experience. Each
specific experience of the same object, in fact, has its own tang, the some-
thing about it that makes it this experience and not the one before it. This
is, of course, only saying that no two experiences can be identical. Other-
wise, we should not be able to distinguish them. The new experience,
has woven into it associatively the activities of the past experience, and
possesses besides the fringe of present sensational processes. This does
not mean that they exist unmodified side by side. We have a new experi-

SPECIFIC AESTHETIC CATEGORIES 9 1

ence, a concrete new situation, only when there is active reorganization,
when, within limits, every element is actively "made over." By "within
limits " I mean nothing more than that the experience does not break down
as a whole, become bipolar, and demand entire reorganization. I am
speaking now of immediate experiences, of which the aesthetic is a type,
in which the unitary character is not lost. The situation remains for
consciousness an unbroken whole with a certain emotional coloring, due
to the minor readjustments going on within it.

Each type of aesthetic experience, such as listening to music, looking
at a picture, following a drama, or reading poetry, has its peculiar timbre,
due to the special activities involved, the special emotional reverberation.
But what makes them all aesthetic is their feel, and that is due to the way
in which the constituent elements are combined far more than to their
character in themselves. Two experiences, made up largely of diflferent
elements, may have approximately the same feel. This is roughly illus-
trated by the ease with which we translate one sort of experience into the
values of another. In its simplest form it is shown in "colored hearing"
and other forms of synaesthesia. Aesthetically a sunset may give us the
sense of hearing a piece of music or reading a poem. The emotion, the
mood, aroused is similar. One often comes across popular generaliza-
tions of this sort that indicate more than mere intellectual comparison.
Berenson says that Michael Angelo is the Milton, Titian the Shake-
speare, of Italian painting.^ To me, Beethoven suggests both Angelo and
Milton; Chopin suggests Shelley; Wagner, Browning. The artists and
the critics justly reprobate such comparisons as superficial and as tending
to blur the essential differences among the arts. But from the side of the
analysis of immediate aesthetic experiences, they call attention to the
common basis by reason of which we call them all aesthetic.

It is, then, the possibility of a large number of substitutions that gives
the aesthetic its distinctive character, its richness and potency. These
substitutions may be said to be of two sorts — the substitution of one
activity for another in successive experiences, and the mutual substituti-
bility of activities within any one manifold. Both, of course, enter into the
total effect of any concrete aesthetic experience. The first sort I have just
noted in the common emotional tone of different activity complexes; the
second is only another way of putting the fact that the constituents of any
aesthetic complex support instead of interfere with one another. It
is important to keep in mind, moreover, that by substitutibility is never
meant identity in a structural sense. We never substitute one thing for
I The Study and Criticism oj Italian Art, First Series, p. 45.

92 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

another if the two are exactly alike. It is only when they are in some
respects different, but do the same work, meet the same requirements.
It is this aspect of the aesthetic that prevents our tying it to any fixed con-
tent or technique. The shores of the history of criticism are strewn with
the wrecks of such attempts. The permanency of great works of art
depends upon substitution no less than does the creation of new forms.
Our aesthetic reaction to Greek sculpture or to Italian painting is undoubt-
edly different from that of their contemporaries. It is a fabric woven of
different colors and lusters, shot with different images. But because it
also is wrought of divers threads, embroidered with divers blended figures,
it too is true aesthetic stuff of the loom. Our sense of strangeness and
trouble in looking at a picture of Manet's or at a Japanese prinL'in listening
to a tone-poem of Richard Strauss's, means that as yet the substitutions
among the activities aroused are only partial. Trains of associated images,
even certain bodily processes, are as yet recalcitrant. Our aesthetic
co-ordination is still in the making. Furthermore, the substitutional
capabilities of the aesthetic account for its social value and also for the
well-known fact that an experience of the same object may be to us at one
time aesthetic, at another time, not.

It is not to be forgotten at this point that substitutions occur in all
types of mental operation. They are the gist of the selective, symbolizing
work of attention, of judgment, the essence of the concept. ) Baldwin uses
the principle of substitution to account for change in both the phylogenetic
and the ontogenetic series; it offers him his only real escape from the
stereotyped repetitions of his circular or imitative reactions.^ I do not
advance the notion of substitution as affording a new type of explanation
of the aesthetic experience. It is really implied in all that has been said
hitherto regarding the aesthetic as a particular form of mental organization.
It serves merely to bring out at a fresh angle the richness and fulness of its
constitution.

Experimental psychology in these days is devoting considerable atten-
tion to the investigation of certain of the formal aesthetic categories. It
has dealt chiefly with symmetry and rhythm, both as being primary phe-
nomena from which the other categories may be derived and as lending
themselves most successfully to experimental procedure. The work of
Fechner* on the "golden section" is classic; and in his footsteps have

» Mental Development, pp. 257-59; cf. pp. 22-25.
a Vorschule der Aesthetik, Vol. I, chap. xiv.

SPECIFIC AESTHETIC CATEGORIES 93

followed Witmer,^ Pierce,' Jonas Cohn,3 Dr. Puffer,4 and others. Bolton,'
Meumann,'^ and Robert MacDougall' have made notable investigations of
rhythm.

It is interesting to note that two recent studies in the aesthetics
of visual form, Dr. Puffer's Studies in Symmetry and Mr. Angler's The
Aesthetics of Unequal Division, both reduce asymmetrical forms having
aesthetic value to cases of substitutional symmetry. In fact, they imply
that it is only as symmetry becomes to some extent substitutional that it
becomes in itself aesthetic. Dr. Puffer, dealing chiefly with material of
high content value, reproductions of European masterpieces of painting,
but comparing them with specimens of primitive art and examining them as
examples of space composition, finds that "only in the course of artistic
development do we find the rigid, yet often unbalanced, symmetry relaxing
into a free substitutional symmetry.''^ By balance she means a symmetry
attained through equivalents or substitutes instead of through mere redu-
plication of parts. Angier, going back to Fechner's problem of the most
pleasing division of a line, finds that the seeming preference for unsymme-
trical division is really a preference for a "subtle symmetry," since the motor
innervation demanded in following the longer line is balanced by the com-
bination of innervation and inhibition, or, more correctly, by the inner-
vation of antagonistic muscles, in following the shorter line. This gives
consciousness of an equal expenditure of energy. He calls this "a sym-
metry of a higher order, because objectively the disposition of its ele-
ments is not graphically obvious, and psychophysically the quantitative
unity is attained through a greater variety of processes. "9

These results are in fine with the position taken by modern painters
and art critics that the essence of the aesthetic value of a picture lies in
"composition," in pattern or arrangement of parts, not in subject-matter
or associative elements in general. While these may reinforce the pri-
mary aesthetic or "formal" elements in a picture, they can never in them-

I Philosophische Siudien, Vol. IX.
» Psychological Review, Vol. I.

3 Allgemeine Aesthetik (1901).

4 Psychological Review, Monograph Supplements, Vol. IV.

5 American Journal of Psychology, Vol. VI.

6 Philosophische Studien, Vol. X.

7 Psychological Review, Monograph Supplements, Vol. IV.

8 Harvard Psychological Sttidies; Psychological Review, Monograph Supplements,
Vol. IV, p. 539.

9 Ibid., p. 561.

94 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

selves make it aesthetic, when the other requirements are lacking. The aes-
thetic is essentially structural, not representational.^ This psychological
and artistic view is borne out by a genetic survey of art forms. The arts
of primitive and natural peoples begin for the most part in rude design,
symbol, pattern, and only gradually take on a representational character.^

The studies in rhythm are so complicated and so detailed that citation
from them would hardly serve our purpose. In general, they show that
rhythms having distinct aesthetic value give marked evidence of subjec-
tive substitutions and of progressive integration of parts into larger wholes.
Rhythm invariably means control, and that control which involves the
highest degree of subordination and integration of elements is that which
is most fully reported in consciousness. Such control of many factors is
on the psychical side the aesthetic experience. Rhythms having aesthetic
value are found on examination to be far from being as simple as they are
for consciousness. R. H. Stetson, in his paper on "Rhythm and Rhyme,"
says in a passage already quoted in part (p. 31):

The free reading of verse easily passes over into singing or chanting. When
this happens, the thing most noticeable in the new form is its regulated, automatic,
and somewhat rigid character Along with this precision of all the move-
ments comes a tendency to beat a new rhythm. This accompanying rhythm is
simpler and broader in character; it is a kind of long swell on which the speech
movements ripple, .... a third rhythm may appear to mark the main stresses
of the two processes .... The essential character of musical rhythm, as
contrasted with the rhythm of both simple sounds and of verse, is just this co-
ordination of a number of rhythms which move side by side. This is the reason
for the immense complexity and variety of musical rhythms. The processes
check each other, and furnish a basis for a precision and elaborateness of
rhythmical movements in the individual parts which is quite impossible in a
simple rhythra.3

Rhythm is, of course, only one factor in the total aesthetic effect of
modern music; but it furnishes the fundamental framework which carries
the subtler tonal factors. Rhythm, psychologically considered, means
the satisfaction of recurrent expectation. After the first few repetitions
of the objective interval or period — one repetition is held sufficient to
initiate the rhythm experience^the mind looks forward, is on the stretch
for the recurrence of the stimulus. Where such satisfaction of expectation
is long delayed or irregular, consciousness is unpleasantly toned, and seeks

^ A. W. Dow, Composition; H. R. Poore, Pictorial Composition; etc.

3 Cf. Ernest FenoUosa, " The Fine Arts," Elementary School Teacher, Vol. V.

3 Harvard Psychological Studies, Psychological Review, Monograph Supplements,
Vol. IV, pp. 465, 466.

SPECIFIC AESTHETIC CATEGORIES 95

to readjust the situation, but where, as in rhythm, the alternations of expec-
tation and satisfaction are regular, the situation maintains itself, and the
tensions and relaxations mutually reinforce. If there was no growth,
no construction, however, the experience would soon become monotonous;
and this is, indeed, the case with the persistence of a simple rhythm. But
literally the experience never is the repetition of a single, unchanging
element. Each new beat of the rhythm is modified psychologically by all
that has gone before, and modifies all that comes after, so that both the
expectation and the fulfilment in each case is different from the one preced-
ing it. That is, the rhythm experience is a whole, in which each part is
shaped by its position within that whole. MacDougall says on this point:

There is properly no repetition of identical sequences in rhythm It

. ... is, indeed, in strict terms, inconceivable; for by its very recurrence it
(the sequence) is differentiated from the initial presentation, and combines organi-
cally with the latter to produce a more highly synthetic form. And however often
this process is repeated, each representation of the original sequence will have
become an element functionally unique and locally unalterable in the last and
highest synthesis which the whole series presents.'

Whether the rhythmic whole be a measure or a symphony, each element
is an increment. The unique power of rhythm is that it binds together
a complex dynamic whole, so that the end is felt from the beginning, and
yet is not revealed in all its richness until the final moment of attainment.
Such a description is practically what we have given as the essence of the
aesthetic experience; and we may safely say, I think, that at the heart of
every aesthetic experience is rhythm.

All the recent experimental studies of specific aesthetic categories
emphasize the motor or activity elements entering in, and the complex
interrelations of these constituents. They therefore corroborate, so far
as they go, the position I have taken that the aesthetic categories must
find their place and explanation within the total aesthetic experience or
situation.

Keeping this reference to the total experience in mind, we get the imme-
diate bearings of such terms as the "significant," the "characteristic,"
and of such formulations of method as the principles of economy and
restraint. These are obviously derived more directly from the immediate
experience than are the formal categories. (They essay to give the total
effect of such an experience or the means by which it is achieved. When
one asks, "Significant, characteristic of what?" one is obliged to answer

I "The Structure of Simple Rhythm Forms," Psychological Review, Monograph
Supplements, Vol. IV, pp. 318, 319.

96 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

at first sight, "Of the object." But it is the object as felt, as a part of
the aesthetic consciousness, not as detached, as reflected upon afterward.
The terms represent an effort to catch and to crystallize the entire aesthetic
experience, to sum up its unitary and concrete nature, its high individ-
uality. If we accept my description of the aesthetic as involving the
incorporation into one co-ordination of a host of minor activities, the
terms "significant" and "characteristic" give a fairly adequate account of
the situation from the conscious side. It is, to use terms that I have
already overworked, an immediate sense of the fulness, satisfactoriness,
exhaustiveness of the situation — a feeling of enhanced vitahty and power.
In such a frame of mind one seems to penetrate into the heart of things, to
reahze emotionally all their possibilities.' Nothing is lacking, yet nothing
is superfluous. In becoming aesthetically identified with the object,
all incongruities and excrescences cease to exist for consciousness. The
experience may well be called significant, characteristic. It takes up into
itself all the resources of the situation. It is familiar because we feel
ourselves so thoroughly at home in it; it is novel because there is a sort
of joyous wonder at having come so suddenly into possession. The
moment is peculiarly intimate, peculiarly our own, at the same time that
our personality is enlarged to its widest scope.

The term "economy,"^ though applied by the outside observer, is
relevant to the description of such an immediate experience because any
awareness of waste or strain would at once indicate the presence of activ-
ities not thoroughly wrought into the co-ordination, and would reveal dis-
cordant, and therefore non-aesthetic and non-characteristic, elements in
the situation. Restraint applies to the high degree of functional inhibition
present in an experience where many activities persist in a state of counter-
poise and equilibrium. But both terms may be used with regard to any
form of co-ordination, and so are not of prime importance in aesthetics.

n. THE TYPES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Hitherto I have considered the aesthetic experience as if it were an
immediate experience always broadly of one type, however much the
objective media might differ. But the naive person and the critic alike
recQgnize certain distinctive types, having their own characteristics, although
falling under the general category of the aesthetic. The tendency among
critics has been, on the whole, to magnify the differences rather than the

I Herbert Spencer, Essays Scientific, Political and Speculative, Vol. II, essays on
"The Philosophy of Style" and on "Gracefulness;" Bernard Bosanquet, History of
Aesthetic, pp. 386, 387.

THE TYPES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 97

'likenesses among them, and to set the sublime, the tragic, the comic, over »
'against the beautiful proper, as in some sense contrasted and irreducible
forms. The question of the place and significance of the ugly has also
been a source of perplexity ^nd dispute.

Here I can only show that these types of experience are not inconsistent
with my statement of the aesthetic. As in any other form of conscious
experience, the degree of organization attained in the aesthetic, the
specific habits or groups of habits most intimately involved, and the rela-
tions of activities to one another within the co-ordination may vary widely
within the limits marking off the aesthetic as a distinctive type of experi-
ence. These limits I have described as the attainment of control, not
through a dropping-out of most of the elements of conflict, or through a
successive, serial resolution of tensions, but through the incorporation of
all the elements concerned into one comprehensive whole.

It should have been made clear by this stage of the argument, however,
that the "pause of satisfaction" does not emerge merely at the culmination
of this process of organization. Neither does it remain stable throughout
the entire process. The incorporation of all the various activities is not
literally, but only approximately, simultaneous. In some experiences
these stages in the process reveal themselves directly to consciousness;
in others they are so welded together that they reveal themselves only to
artificial analysis. As in the life-history of all co-ordinations, the move-
ment is undoubtedly from the larger, more comprehensive adjustments
to the finer and more delicate. As this process proceeds, the aesthetic
experience buds and then ripens. Moreover, since the whole, though
unitary for consciousness, is not simple, but a congeries of lesser activities,
there exist within it at any one moment a host of minor strains and reso-
lutions, all tending more or less to fall into accord with what we may call
the major rhythm, but succeeding or falling short according to the stage
of the process and their own relation to it. In other words, we have pres-
ent both the successive and simultaneous substitutions which we have
described, the rhythmic advance, of which each phase is determined both
by its place in the whole and by its own make-up. The "patterns" which
this interplay of elements may assume are, at the present stage of our knowl-
edge, innumerable. Language is too clumsy to convey an adequate notion
of the intricacy and delicacy of mental operations. In such a situation it
is quite possible to think of individual minor activities remaining relatively
stubborn, bound up less integrally with the whole, and so interfering to a
certain extent and tending to escape. Such an account has inevitably an
associationist cast, as if one were thinking of the aesthetic experience as a

98 - THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

mere aggregation of mental units somehow brought into artificial connection
and individually unmodified. But the whole drift of the discussion should
forbid such interpretation.

As regards the specific activities taking part in any concrete aesthetic
experience, we find normally in each a cluster of what are often called
"fundamental habits," motor- visual, motor-auditory, mo tor- visual-audi-
tory, and the like. In these the co-ordinations are so close and so long
established that they give, on the psychological side, examples of com-
plete fusion. When drawn within the aesthetic co-ordination they have
much to do with determining its character, with setting its rhythms. They
are themselves modified in being subjected to the control of the larger
co-ordination, but they give it a dominant coloring. Into relation with
these habit-complexes fall the various physiological rhythms, and the
subtler activities of memory and imagination.

A concrete aesthetic situation, then, has its character determined by a
number of specific conditions. It may involve this or that cluster of funda-
mental habits. It may go through certain recognizable stages of develop-
ment from the partially to the completely aesthetic. It may retain or
shake out, in the course of its progress, minor aspects that are not in them-
selves aesthetic, though caught transiently within the aesthetic whole. These
elements must not, of course, be sufficiently in opposition to disintegrate the
major co-ordination. It is important also to consider that these relatively
non-aesthetic elements may have a positive aesthetic value in prolonging
the experience as a whole. The more complete and perfect a co-ordination
is, the less likely is it to persist. It has fulfilled its purpose and begins to
fall apart through its own effect as a stimulus. In fact, any aesthetic
experience, as I have said, maintains itself only through its play of ten-
sions, its give-and-take of equivalents, its balance of stimulation and
recuperation. The aesthetic character of the most absorbed enjoyment
of a statue, a picture, a piece of music, is due to the balances achieved
through "substitutional symmetry" or rhythm. There is a certain
"struggle of activities" even here, though the total effect is one of assuage-
ment and serenity. In other cases the struggle itseff comes into conscious-
ness, although never as confusion, but always bounded and controlled
by a tranquilizing sense of the situation in its entirety.

Within the bounds of this general description there is room, I think,
for all the modifications of the aesthetic. What we mean by pure beauty
seems to me to be represented by the co-ordination that approximates most
closely to the simultaneous blending of all the constituents, to a fusion,
so that we have little consciousness of stages within the process, of the pat-

THE TYPES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 99

tern of construction as~such, but a sudden and widely diffused sense of
agreement among all our activities, an awareness of enhancement and
enlargement of life, of freedom and harmony. And this is by no means
incompatible with a sense of tranquillity and attainment; in fact, it neces-
sitates it. What is often spoken of as the poignancy of beauty belongs,
as I see it, to its dying fall, to the moment when the body of emotional
satisfaction aroused rolls back over the entire organism, and the experi-
ence begins to fall asunder. Keats catches this aspect of beauty incom-
parably when he says of Melancholy:

She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu.

Such realization of the sadness of beauty comes, however, at the moment
subsequent to that of total absorption in the experience. It is an emo-
tion that is the first-fruits of reflection upon the situation. Literature
runs over with laments at the fleeting nature of beauty; but such transi-
toriness is of its very essence as immediate experience, however much we
may hold reflectively that "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever." It is a
joy that we may experience over and over; it does not last long at any
one time.

Modern aesthetics, in its reaction from the metaphysical interpre-
tations of beauty,] has fought shy of definitions, and has at times gone to
the length of denying that beauty plays a necessary part in the aesthetic
experience. But if we take beauty in some sense as our aesthetic stand-
ard, meaning that experience in its most conspicuous and concentrated
form, there seems no valid reason for abandoning a term so deeply rooted
in the vocabularies both of aesthetic theory and of daily life.

The sublime is more difficult to place with reference to the aesthetic.
Its nature has long been a theme for controversy. Both Burke^ and Kant,'
as is well known, distinguished it from the beautiful, making it to some
extent antagonistic to it and bringing it under only their most general
statement of the aesthetic. Burke's treatment is in terms of physiology
and of the nature of the object; Kant's is in terms of the philosophically
subjective and objective — phraseology that I have sought to avoid — and
can be understood and criticized only in the light of his discussion of the
aesthetic judgment and its relations to the intellectual judgment. He
makes the sublime more subjective, more emotional than the beautiful, not

I A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,
Part IV, sections 1-18.

» Critique of Judgment (translated by Branard), Part I, Book II.

lOO THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

SO dependent upon the form of the object. "No sensible form can contain
the subhme properly so called.'" "The beautiful," he says, "directly brings
with it a feeling of the furtherance of life .... but the Sublime is ... .
produced by the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a
consequent stronger outflow of them."*

Unfair as it may be to enlist Kant in the service of a discussion so alien
to his own, this last statement is in line with my own rough formulation
of the sublime, though my mode of approach is more like Burke's. In
terms of the aesthetic situation, the sublime, as I conceive it, stands for a
co-ordination so extraordinarily wide that all the activities bound up in
it, particularly the groups of fundamental habits, are, so to speak, on the
stretch to compass it, are in unstable equilibrium within it. This imparts
to the experience as a whole a feeling of widely diffused, though not exces-
sive, strain. It is a feeling similar to that which we have to a slight extent
when we take an unusually long breath. Though every aesthetic experi-
ence involves inhibition and concomitant emotional consciousness, they
are here extraordinarily widespread. If the experience is prolonged, it
verges upon the unpleasant, and the co-ordination collapses. Such a
situation leads to reflection upon the ordinary level of experience and this
exalted level, and to a comparison of the self in the two experiences, or
of the self and the object embodying grandeur or power. This comparison
contributes to an enlarged view of the self, to a widening of the boundaries
of one's personal experience. The effect of the sublime, then, seems to
me to be reached through what we may call the large circumference of the
co-ordination, ' I cannot agree with Santayana's statement that "unity
by inclusion gives us the beautiful; unity by exclusion, opposition, and
isolation gives us the sublime. "3 To me the sense of the sublime arises
just because the felt unity includes so much. It is true, however, that
the awareness is of the unity rather than of its various elements. In gen-
eral, I accept his further description, though the word "passive" seems
to me subject to misinterpretation. "Both are pleasures; but the pleasure
of the one is warm, passive, and pervasive ; that of the other cold, imperi-
ous, and keen. The one identifies us with the world; the other raises
us above it. "3 One, I think, brings out all the implications and possi-
bilities of our ordinary life; the other lifts us to a new level that affects us
with a breath of the strange and the austere. We may say, perhaps,
that one possesses and one lacks, at least in any marked degree, the "famili-

' Critique of Judgment, p. 103.

» Ibid., p. 102.

3 The Sense of Beauty, pp. 235, 236.

THE TYPES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE loT'

arity feeling." And they dissolve into different types of reflection. But
they are both aesthetic experiences.

In a brief statement of the relations of the tragic, the comic, etc., to
my general view of the aesthetic experience, I shall not attempt to deal
with the extensive literature centering about these terms, especially about
the tragic. The classic discussions from Aristotle's down I must assume
to be familiar. In the drama, whether tragedy or comedy, we have the
unfolding of the aesthetic experience in its most complex and sustained,
if not in its purest and most concentrated, form. The various stages in
the development of the experience here come into consciousness as recog-
nized elements in the total effect. We get on a scale large enough for
observation the whole movement and design of the aesthetic. And we see
that, while it is built on the "hunting-pattern" of active conflict, yet this
conflict in all its manifestations is given unity of effect, maintains a moving
equilibrium by means of an elaborate balance of parts, a highly organized
series of substitutions and compensations of both the sequential and simul-
taneous types.

Freytag's' familiar analysis of dramatic construction illustrates the
successive or rhythmic sort of substitutions. He schematizes the action
of a play by means of a pyramid, or, more accurately, by a triangle, some-
times equilateral with the apex at the mechanical middle of the play, some-
times with one side longer, sometimes the other. One side represents
the rising action; the other, the falling; the apex, their point of acutest
conflict, the crisis. Acts and scenes, though in some respects conventional
divisions, show also, in the hands of a master of dramatic form, a similar
rise and fall. They are the smaller ripples of a larger rhythm, each deter-
mined by those that precede and follow, as well as by the whole of which it
is a component. = Where there seem to be irregularities analysis reveals
expenditure of equivalent amounts of energy as clearly as it may be seen
in the case of the unequal division of a line or in the different compensatory
values of bright and dark colors.3

Professor R. G. Moulton 's study of Macbeth'^ brings out admirably the
various ways in which the rhythmic balance of the play is preserved with-
out the slightest sacrifice of variety and interest. The play as a whole deals
with a crime and its punishment, a sin and its retribution, a flawed char-
acter and its disintegration. In the first half we have Macbeth's series of

1 The Technique of the Drama (translated by E. J. McEwan).

2 Cf. E. Woodbridge, r/jc Drama: ItsLawandltsTechniqiie.

3 E. Pierce, " The Aesthetics of Simple Forms," Psychological Review, Vol. I, p. 494.

4 Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, pp.127-43.

I©2 ' • ' * '' THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

successes; in the second half, his series of failures. Banquo in the first half
is balanced by Macduflf in the last half. The swift succession of events in
the first part, the tense excitement and horror caused by the murder of
Dimcan, are balanced by the slower succession of lesser and somewhat con-
fused events, with their frequent shiftings of scene, in the second part.
The tremendous poise and self-control of Lady Macbeth at the time of the
murder and after Macbeth 's accession to the throne are balanced by the
pitiable self-revelation of the sleep-walking scene. The reliance of Mac-
beth upon the outward things of life and upon outward supernatural agen-
cies is balanced by his ironical betrayal by all these props. In general,
the slower and less individually significant events of the second half of the
play roll up, as no sharp, decisive action could do, the full weight of punish-
ment for such crimes and weaknesses as Macbeth 's. At the last, his death
comes, not as a capping horror, but rather as affording relief and escape
both for him and for the spectator. Death, Macbeth as a brave soldier
had never feared. It is life rather under conditions of collapse and dis-
honor that would be a harrowing and useless prolongation of agony for
him and for the witnesses of his career; and so would mar the unity of the
whole.

At every stage in Macbeth, too, may be detected instances of intricate
and subtle " substitutional symmetry," the playing-off of one contempo-
raneous element or group of elements against another. Macbeth and Lady
Macbeth, Macbeth and Banquo, the mutual contrasts or heightenings of
setting and action — most of all, the competing motives, doubts, and pur-
poses within each soul — make essential contribution to the total effect.^
In no case are these elements random and purposeless — they are governed
by the general laws operative in all aesthetic structure and pattern.

Such an account gives only a skeleton of the multiple ways in which
this play illustrates the forms of aesthetic balance. Its substitutions and
compensations are so skilfully effected that there is no suggestion of artifice.
Its moments of tragic horror are compensated for by periods of repose or
by gradual diminution of strain. It shows the aesthetic as opposed to the
non-aesthetic use of contrast. Its content value is so great as to render

I The above discussion was written before the appearance of Dr. Ethel D. Puffer's
book, The Psychology of Beauty. It is obvious that what I have called "contempor-
aneous balance" she has worked out fully and made the essential dramatic element,
"confrontation" or balanced tension. The extent to which I am indebted to her is
indicated by my borrowing the alternative term that I have used, "substitutional
symmetry," from her "Studies in Symmetry." Yet to my mind she hardly does
justice to the forward and backward movement in the drama, the rhythmic or
sequential balance.

THE TYPES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 103

difl5cult an analysis in terms of bare aesthetic construction. But, in spite
of its violence and bloodshed, it "purges through pity and terror" as truly
as did the noblest of Greek tragedies. It leads to thought of self in rela-
tion to laige ethical and spiritual problems, thus bringing in the element
of the sublime that is essential in all true tragedy.

I have used as illustration a particular art product. But the drama
can never be considered intelligibly apart from the immediate experience
of the spectator or creator, his aesthetic participation in the situation. I
have, of course, made that experience the central point of my entire dis-
cussion, so that it is not necessary to do more than refer to it here.

Keeping in mind this aesthetic identification of the spectator with the
structural development of the drama, I make bold to say that the more
I study the drama, especially the tragic drama, the more fully it reveals
itself as pre-eminently the type of all aesthetic experience. Its content is,
of course, varied and distinctive; its tensions and relaxation, stimulation
and repose, substitutions and compensations, are conspicuously above
the level of conscious discrimination. But its ''pattern" may be traced in
all forms of art, all aesthetic situations. It is shown most clearly in music,
but it underlies even the enjoyment of a picture or a landscape. We have
got beyond the point where we characterize any manifestation of the aesthe-
tic attitude as passive or static. All, in their degree, are active, constructive,
rhythmic. This may seem an extreme position to take; and it obviously does
not refer to the art product in itself or to the reflective estimate of the person
after the aesthetic experience. But it is a view that cannot be alien to the
type of thinker who regards all thought as in some sense an inward drama.

The peculiar aesthetic efifect of comedy and the comic has long been a
puzzle, and has perhaps been made a greater puzzle than need be. It has
even been said to lie almost wholly beyond the borders of the aesthetic.
But that is arbitrarily to shut out experiences that are rich in aesthetic satis-
faction. There seems to be no doubt that the genuinely comic experi-
ence, whether only of the moment or prolonged throughout a drama, is
immediate and self-inclosed, having its own pattern and unity, and demand-
ing the intimate participation of the spectator. Like tragedy, it has its
rhythm of stimulation and relief; like it, though by means of widely differ-
ent emotional effects, it offers a basis for new levels of achievement, new
envisagement of non-aesthetic situations.

The various theoretical discussions of the comic, whether they fall under
the general heads of the "degradation theory," the "baffled expectation
theory," or the incongruity theory, explicitly so called, all imply that in-
congruity of some sort, deviation from established standard, contrast, is an

I04 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

essential element in the comic* The difficulty with all these general state-
ments is that so many cases of incongruity can be educed, in which there is
no trace of the comic. This has led to the further specification in some of
them that the thing compared with the norm shall be smaller, more trifling,
not larger and more important. Such a view is illustrated by Herbert
Spencer's phrase, "descending incongruity,"^ by Lipps's little thing mas-
querading as great and suddenly revealed in its true character.^ Here we
have various modifications of the "degradation theory" baldly stated by
Hobbes. They all involve, furthermore, some recognition of Kant's view
of the part played by expectation and surprise — the irruption of the unex-
pected into the incomplete situation dominated by the expectant attitude.

In general, the comic is more difficult to handle apart from specified
content than is the tragic. The most illuminating treatise that we have in
English, George Meredith's Essay on Comedy, is rich in concrete illustra-
tive matter. But Meredith's insistence upon a complex and polished
society as essential to the flowering of the spirit of true comedy suggests a
consideration that may be translated, at least partially, into the terms used
in this discussion. His recognition of the social as playing an important part
in comedy is borne out from the psychological and genetic points of view by
one of the most recent books on the subject, Sully's Essay on Laughter, in
which the writer says: "Much, at least, of our laughter .... may
undoubtedly be regarded as directed to something which fails to comply with
a social requirement, yet so trifling that we do not feel called upon to judge
the shortcoming severely." He sums up the social advantages of the comic
as follows: "the maintenance of customs which from the point of view of
the community, or of some class of the community, are to be regarded as
good, the keeping-down of vices and follies, and the furtherance of social
co-operation." Psychologically he shows that the social value of the
comic resides in its immediate and high contagiousness. "Laughter is
social in the sense that it is essentially choral and so uniting. A gathering
of yokels at a fair laughing at a clown tends for the moment to become a
coherent group; and the habit of laughing together will tend to consolidate
the group."* This has to do, however, with the effect of the comic rather
than with its intrinsic character.

In making a rough formulation of the comic in terms of the consider-
ations used in this paper, I should say that in the first place the co-ordina-

1 J. Sully, Essay on Laughter, chap v.

2 The Physiology oj Laughter: Essays, Vol. I.

3 Aesthetik, pp. 575-84.

4 Op. cit., pp. 139, 255.

THE TYPES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE I05

tion set up in the comic experience is less wide in its range than is that in
the tragic experience, makes less arduous demands upon all parts of the
organism. It never reaches the compass that gives rise to a sense of the
sublime. Its strains and tensions are less keen; its texture, so to speak,
is more loosely woven and flexible. There is a marginal supply of energy
ready to spill over into laughter through the sluiceways of involuntary
discharge. And the character of its substitutions is markedly different.
In tragedy the element of expectation plays a controlling rdle; but that of
surprise is lacking or subordinate. The alternations of tension and relief
are borne on a mounting and then resurgent wave; they are bounded and
controlled by a growing awareness of the whole. That is to say, the sub-
stitutions involved are those of the component parts, of details within the
major rhythm or pattern. There is from the first a ''forecast of the end."
But in comedy the substitutions seem to be on a larger scale, to involve a
sudden voUejace of expectation, a putting into the place of what we have
been looking for, of something equivalent so far as amount of activity is con-
cerned, but of markedly different constitution. This quick exchange of
one kind of total co-ordination for another brings in the element of sur-
prise. It, serves in itself as a further stimulus, raising the whole activity
tone and seftirig free some of this new energy in laughter. Such an ex-
perience freshens and invigorates. It is brisk and tonic. Thus, while the
effect of tragedy is more directly emotional and reflective, that of comedy,
because of this sudden influx of novel stimulation, is at first reflex and
external. In terms of content, the substitution is generally that of indi-
vidual idiosyncrasy for social convention; in terms of mental pattern, that
of a concentrated complex of newly integrated activities for a more extended
group of well-established habits. The total amount of energy involved
may be the same, or it may be less in the complex substituted. But in
either case the distribution of tensions is widely different, and the substi-
tution of one group for the other produces a pleasant shock of surprise.
This shock of substitution does not correspond altogether to Kant's
nullified or annihilated expectation. The expectation is satisfied, but in
an unexpected way. This unexpected outcome, however, must not be such
as to overthrow the experience altogether. In general, of course, there
are unexpected substitutions that are in the highest degree serious and
disagreeable. But they disrupt the experience as such. Professor Lillien
J. Martin's recent and interesting "Experimental Prospecting in the Field
of the Comic"* reports that her returns show that contrast, or incongruity,
"disappointed" — or, as I should prefer to call it, reversed — expectation,
I American Journal of Psychology, Vol. XVI.

IC56 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

and novelty — what I have called surprise — are important and prevalent
elements in the comic experience. Sully holds that "it seems probable
that the part played by surprise in the enjoyment of the laughable has been
exaggerated;" instancing our enjoyment of a perfectly famihar comic
situation. But psychologically surprise is more subtle than we are wont to
regard it; and I am inclined to think that no experience remains comic
unless there is present some unexpected turn to present expectation or
attitude. What we expect normally is conformity to some sort of social
canon; what happens is individual deviation from this canon. This
world of social standard and usage is commonly recognized as a world not
concerned with life and death issues. It is essentially the world of every-
day conduct, of that immediate experience which is too routine to rise to
the aesthetic level, except when some aspect of it assumes this pattern of
reversed expectation. It is worthy of remark that the more serious things
of life appear comic only to two classes of people — those who take them
at their face value without probing below the surface, and those who have
searched them out so deeply that they have become for them familiar matters
of everyday experience. As has been said, one must be very shallow or
very profound to find life as a whole the human comedy. Tragedy may
teach us to "see life steadily and see it whole;" but Comedy teaches us to
find an element of aesthetic satisfaction even in incomplete and partial
views.

There may be said to be two forms of ugliness — the ugliness of monotony
and the ugliness of confusion. The awareness of either kind arises only
as activity becomes in some way arrested, so that attention dwells upon
the situation. If no new mode of procedure offers itself within a reasonable
time, consciousness becomes su£fused in the one case with a feeling of the
niggardliness and meagerness of the situation; in the other, with a feeling
of jangle and bewilderment. In the first case there is greater store of
energy seeking outlet than there are outlets offered; in the other, there are
more solicitations than there is equipment for response and co-ordination.
But in both cases there is inhibition and consequent emotional distturbance.
It is difficult to draw the line between the ugly and the unpleasant or pain-
ful. But in general it may be said that the more quickly some specific line of
action presents itself, the less consciousness there is of the ugliness of the
situation. It is only as we are obliged to contemplate an unsatisfactory
situation as a whole, without being able to react toward it in any efficient
way, that the iron of the ugly enters into our souls. That a thing be ugly
as well as unpleasant or painful, it is necessary that there be a margin of
energy over and above that needed to preserve life and to win its obvious

THE TYPES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE I07

Utilities. It is when we are competent to cope with a situation, but are
externally prevented, that we know the full meaning of the ugly. If we
are exhausted by a routine of narrow habits, if they make unremitting
drains upon us, consciousness sinks to a dull level at which there is neither
ugliness nor beauty. We live in a world of stimulations rather than of
objects. Nothing that approaches aesthetic realization can exist under such
fixed and circumscribed conditions. On the other hand, if the crowding
and conflicting stimulations threaten disruption of our world or of our-
selves, we must either succumb or respond to one stimulus and cease to be
aware of the others. Here, too, we do not construct the object with anything
like aesthetic fulness. Neither is there chance for the emergence of the ugly,
which is temporary engrossment in the unsatisfactoriness of a situation.
It is a realization of the essential character of the situation.

As stimulus, this experience of the ugly may function in two ways. It
may lead negatively to any sort of action that will o£fer escape, drown out the
recollection of the ugly situation. Or it may lead positively, in the case of
the ugliness of poverty of stimulation, to an enrichment of the situation;
in the case of the ugUness of confusion, to an endeavor to bring order out
of disorder, to achieve harmonious control.

In this sense of positive stimulus the ugly has a place in any theory of
aesthetics, at least as a limiting term, marking one sort of initiation of the
aesthetic. When the ugly appears as an organic part of the aesthetic
experience proper, it practically forfeits its right to the name. As the
grotesque, the characteristic, etc., it becomes a contributory factor in
the total effect; and has no lawful place therein, unless it is offset by
some compensating element or is itself resolved in the culmination of the
experience.

PART IV

SOME PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE AESTHETIC
EXPERIENCE

According to the fundamental hypothesis of this analysis of the aesthetic,
it marks the culminating stage of development in every reorganization of
experience. It may not be recognized as aesthetic, but it constitutes the
element of value or worth; and is therefore necessarily present in both the
logical and the ethical, using these terms in their customary sense, as apply-
ing to typical and distinctive forms of experience. More truly, logic, as
dealing with the judgment process, is basic. The aesthetic ''pause of
satisfaction" marks the attainment of new control; it is the signal for the
resumption of action. But for the moment it looks upon the thing to be
done as already done. The end and the means coalesce. It stands for a
complete redintegration of experience.

This aesthetic aspect or moment in every judgment-process has been
remarked. Groos says:

Zweitens darf ein psychologische Aesthetik auch die Lust an der gewonnenen
Erkenntniss nicht ubersehen, die von dem Verstandniss-Urtheil aus in die asthe-
tische Anschauung eindringt. Meinong nennt in seinen " Untersuchungen zur
Wert-Theorie " (1894, S. 36 f) diese Lust ein "Wissengefuhl im Gegensatz zu den
dem Inhalt entspringenden Wertgefuhlen."'

Professor Ormond makes the statement more explicitly and holds such a
conception essential to a true understanding of judgment.

In the last analysis, if a representation fits into the unity of our world, which,
by hypothesis, is the highest conceivable to us in this stage of our experience, it is

accepted as true, and becomes a part of our world-representation Are we

not logically drawn to the conclusion, then, that judgment is distinctively an
aesthetic function ? In view of this question, I think it vitally important that the

aesthetic character of judgment should be recognized The function of

judgment is an affair of the aesthetic consciousness, inasmuch as the relation of

true and false is constituted by the aesthetic category of unity But it is

also important to be remembered that unity as above developed is epistemolo-
gical and not distinctively a category of art.'

I am not concerned here with Professor Ormond 's full theory of judgment.
It is sufl&cient to point out that he considers the unity attained at the con-

» Der aesthetische Genuss, p. 132.
* Foundations 0} Knowledge, p. 238.

108

PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE I09

elusion of the judgment-process essentially aesthetic. This is exactly my
view of the "pause of satisfaction."

The aesthetic, then, marks one limit of the judgment, as the experience
of "shock," interruption, "pure sensation," in the immediate, not the critical,
sense marks the other.* The actual overt fulfilment of the judgment
must be recognized as a new experience, though it is its goal and often
leads to its revision.^ Furthermore, this aesthetic limit, this unification
and consolidation of all the aspects of a previously disturbed situation so that
we may go on to another situation, is what we ordinarily mean by the
formation of a concept. If the emotion-content at the initiation of a logical
or judgment process is a sensation, the emotion-content at its conclusion
is a concept. Professor Kate Gordon has ably contended for the recognition
of the concept as an emotional category:

A concept is an image which functions for more than one situation, or it is

the principle of identity between two or more different things — it is generic

Our apprehension by concept is an implicit apprehension; when we say "animal"
we are not aware of every animal we ever saw, but we have a feeling of possibilities

which could find adequate expression only in a long series of images What

we immediately have is an emotional state — an appreciation without perfect
discrimination. 3

She says further: "Meaning depends upon the possibihty of making
one thing, an emotion, stand for other things, thoughts, i. e., on the possi-
bility of using symbols." We have already seen the pause of satisfaction
has this unitary emotional character, represents many undefined possi-
bilities. So that I think we may fairly say that the concept is not only
emotional, but also essentially aesthetic. Looked at in its retrospective
aspect, we may call the pause of satisfaction aesthetic; looked at in its
prospective aspect, we may call it the concept. But the two aspects are
not to be conceived in isolation. They are correlative and interpret each
other. This statement of the aesthetic in terms of the concept supple-
ments and makes more adequate the psychological statement made earlier
in the discussion regarding the distinction between the "aesthetic image"
and the "working image (cf. pp. 17, 18, 32, 33).

The aesthetic moment thus has two uses. It indicates completed
reconstruction, and it serves as the "emotional deposit" that is carried
over and forms the basis of new experiences, mediate or immediate.

1 Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory, VII, "The Nature of Hypothesis" (M. L.
Ashley), pp. 153, 154.

2 Ibid., XI, "Some Logical Aspects of Purpose" (A. W. Moore), pp. 350, 351.

3 The Psychology of Meaning, pp. 62, 63.

no THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

It is the "psychical disposition" upon which both familiarity and growth
depend.

? In its commonly recognized form as a distinctive type of experience,
the aesthetic may be set over against the logical and the ethical in the
sense in which immediate experience may be set over against mediate.
Both the logical and the ethical represent experience in the making or,
rather, in the remaking, under active reconstruction. In them conscious-
ness is divided, reflective; subject and object, means and ends, are still
held apart. They stand for struggle and for resolution of difficulties in
a more or less serial form. Each, as I have said, involves the aesthetic
phase, but it does not ordinarily become conspicuous or detached for
consciousness, although it is unmistakable in the glow of intellectual absorp-
tion and achievement, in the satisfaction of moral victory. These expe-
riences are sometimes excluded from the aesthetic field, but only through
an arbitrary limitation of the term to experience of sense objects.^ It is
obvious that the aesthetic does not attach itself to any one system or type
of thought. It fvurnishes, rather, the basis and stimulus of many possible
systems and types of thought. It is, as I have phrased it, a reservoir of ,
experiences.

As a remembered experience the aesthetic has an important function
in serving as an ideal of organization, a limit to be reached in every processj
This is implied in what I have said of value as essentially aesthetic. In this
character it holds good only as a standard of attainment for each individual
process; but, like other stages in particular and recurrent activities, it has
been illegitimately generalized into the conception of a fixed goal to be
reached or an absolute standard to be lived up to. Spencer's state of
"absolute ethics,"' F. C. S. Schiller's recent lapse from his "Humanistic"
position by the postulation of an aesthetic "Ultimate, "3 place this fixed
and universal ideal in the future; the "Absolute" of the modern idealists,
the "Ideas" of Plato, refer it to the past or to a timeless existence. But
the abstraction from the situation is alike in both cases.

A ghost of this sort of abstraction clings, as I read it, to Baldwin's
statement of what he christens "aesthenomic idealism." He puts it thus:

Philosophy asks: How can we think reality in one thought? .... The
present writer holds that the category of final interpretation must be a full one,

not an empty one, if it is to have concrete significance It is to be sought

in the interpretation of the actual coefficients of the fullest reality of which we

1 Calkins, Introduction to Psychology, p. 283.

2 Principles of Ethics, Vol. I, Part I, "The Data of Ethics," chaps, xv, xvii.

3 Humanism, Essay XI, " On Preserving Appearances."

PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE III

have experience The fullest, not the emptiest, the concrete experience,

not the logical universal, is the point of view of most adequate interpretation

When we speak of final or absolute experience, what we mean, if we mean any-
thing worth while, is an all-comprehensive and completely full experience.

Now — to state a point of view, not to expand or justify it — there is a type of
mental organization which is in certain ways "fuller" than any other, which
requires and feeds upon — or, to speak philosophically, "transcends" — the oppo-
sition between fact, with its formulations in the Equations of positive science on
the one hand, and purposes, ends, values, and Progressions on the other hand;
it is what is commonly known as the Aesthetic experience. In the essential union
! of the two points of view respectively of the "producer" and the "spectator"
from which a work of art may be approached, we find in our experience the richer
whole. In aesthetic contemplation there is the fulfilment at once of the demands
for a system of relations essentially finished and formulated — something com-
pletely true — and also the satisfactions of a genetic idea of perfect outcome —
something divinely fair.'

If this means to postulate a final "all-comprehensive and completely
full experience," the notion seems to me inherently contradictory. Such
an experience would result either in monotony, lowering, and perhaps
even extinction, of consciousness, or in a new experience that was fuller
still. It is fairer to Baldwin, and more in keeping with his whole way of
thinking, to interpret him as meaning that our fullest aesthetic realization
at any one time of the unity of our world is for us at that time "the Abso-
lute," and that this conception broadens and deepens with the growth
and enrichment of our experience.

This is the position that I have attempted to set forth in this treatment
of the aesthetic experience. The aesthetic as a highly distinctive type of
experience profoundly afifects consciousness, and leads to new situations
and new demands for reconstruction and wider control. A fixed and
unchangeable aesthetic attitude is a contradiction in terms and an anomaly
in experience. On the contrary, the richer and more comprehensive
the control in any one situation, the greater is the incentive to "things
unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."

I "Mind and Body from the Genetic Point of View," Psychological Review, Vol.
X, pp. 245, 246.

INDEX

Activity, 9, 10, 27, 29, 69, 78; aesthetic, 19-21;
feeling of, 10, 13, 13; serial and simultaneous
types of, 13, 17, 18, 32-33, 61, 62, 86, 91, loi;
activity theories, 79, 81-86.

Aesthetic, the: categories of, 21, 22, 68, 77-79,
87-96; definition of, 27, 28; description of,
S, 19, 20, 23, 24, 34. 35. 46, 64, 66, 77, 78, 8i,
89, 90, 92; emotional nature of, 62-65, 74,
78; racial evolution of, 48-61; great periods of,
37-47; the aesthetic moment, 30-33, 35, 46,
47, 72, 84; social nature of, 72-79, 80, 8i;
types of, 96-107.

Allen, G., 21, 25, 33, 34.

Angell, J. R., 7, 13, 16.

Art: Greek, 40, 41; modem, 44-46; primitive,
53-60; Renaissance, 43; as representation and
as design, 56, 60, 93, 94; art and leisure, 56,
60, 62.

Artist class, 61, 62.

Ashley, M. L., 109.

Attention, 10, 11, 13, 29, 33, 50, 56, 59, 65, 69,
75i 90> 92, 106.

Bain, A., 22, 25.

Balance, 87, 88, 90, 93, loi, 102.

Baldwin, J. M., 26, 69, 83, 8s, 92. no, in.

Beauty, 27, 87, 99, 100.

Berenson, B., 22, 24, 73, 76, 82.,

Bosanquet, B., 79, 96.

Bucher, K., 25, 59, 73.

Burke, E., 99.

Calkins, M. W., 65, no.

Categories, ae.sthetic, 21-23, 68, 77, 78, 87-96.

Characteristic, the, 87, 95, 96, 107.

Comic, the, 87, 103-6.

Communication, 74, 77, 79, 81.

Compulsion, 12, 85.

Concept, the, 92, 109.

Conduct, 7, 10, XI, 17.

Consciousness: aesthetic, 20, 72, 73, 77, 78, 84,

91, 96, 97, 100, 106, 107, no; general nature

of, 6-9, 13, 16, 17, 19, 23, 26, 27, 30, 48, 49,

68, 69; social, 72, 73, 74, 77.
Contagion, 68, 104.
Contrast, 88, 89, 102, 103, 105, 106.
Control, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 52, 53, 57, 60, 64, 81, 88,

94, 97, 108, III.
Co-ordination, 13, 14, 16, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 70,

81, 88, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97, 98, 100, 106.

Darwin, C, 63, 66.
Dewey, J., 7, 11, 12, 63, 69.
Drama, the, 54, 58, S9, 101-3.

Economy, 87, 96.

EfiFort, 12, 65, 70.

EinjiUdung, 26, 82, 83.

Emotion: aesthetic, 20, 22, 32, 34, 46, 62-64, 67,
72, 73. 74, 75. 78, 79, 109; expression of emo-
tion theories, 79-82; nature of, 29, 42, 53, 62-
65; social character of, 74, 75.

Ends, 6, 8, 10, 12, 17, 21, 29, 30, 33, 59, 73, 77,

78, 88, 108.
Enhancement, 19, 20, 23, 32, 34, 40, 43, 45, 46,

64, 73. 74. 78, 82, 89, 96, 99, 100.
Equilibrium, 32, 33, 35, 46, 90, 96, 100, loi.
Ethical, the, 7, 32, 65, 108, 110.
Evolution: biologic, 13, 24, 47, 48, 63, 65; social

47, 48, 50.
Expectation, 19, 31, 94, 95, 103, 104, 105.

Experience, 5, 9-13; 19, aesthetic, 19-21, 75, 77>
89, 90, 91, 98, 103, 109, no; definition of,
26, 27; growth of, 69-71; immediate, 11-13,
21, 23, 27, 28, 29, 68, 77, 79, 8i, 86; mediate,
II, 28, 81, 88; racial, 26, 65, 70, 71.

Fechner, G. T., 21, 25, 92.

Festival, 54, 55, 58, 59.

Freytag, G., loi.

Functional Psychology, 6-19, 23, 28, 32, 79.

Gordon, K., 34, 35, 53, 109.
Greece, aesthetic period in, 37-40.
Groos, K., 20, 75, 8s, 86, 108.
Gummere, F. B., 25, 54, 59, 60.
Guyau, J. M., 34.

Habit, 9, 10, II, 12, 13, 32, 34, 48, 50, 97, 98;

group habits, 57, 69,
Harmony, 87, 88.
Hirn, I., 25, 34, 40, 54, 79, 81, 82, 86.

Illusion, aesthetic, 84, 85.

Image, 14-17, 76, 82, 83, 92; aesthetic, 18, 33,

109; working, 17, 18, 109.
Imitation, 68, 70, 92; "inner imitation," 26, 81,

8s.
Impulse, 13, 14, 16, 65, 69, 70, 74, 80, 81, 86.
Individual, and society, 53, 55, 68, 69, 70.
Infection, aesthetic, 77, 79.
Inhibition, 16, 29, 35, 50, 70, 76, 96, 100, 106.
Interest, 9, 10, 12, 78.

James, W., 8, 9, 49, 55, 63, 74, 75.
Judgment: aesthetic, 27, 67, 79, 108, 109; criti-
cal, 28, 66, 67, 68, 79, 84.

Kant, 22, 44, 99, 100, 104, 105.

Lange, K., 26, 84, 85.

Lee, v., 24, 26, 64, 65, 75, 82.

Lipp>s, T., 26, 34, 82, 83, 104.

Logical, the, 7, 87, 108, no.

Macbeth, loi, 102.

Marshall, H. R., 20, 22, 79, 80, 81, 86.

Martin, L. J., 105, 106.

MacDougall, R., 31, 93.

McLennan, S. F., 67.

Mead, G. H., 16, 72.

Meaning, 7, 35, 67, 109.

Moore, A. W., n, 30, 109.

Moulton, R. G., 101, 102.

113

114

INDEX

Music, 45, 46, p4.

Novel, 45.

Object, the, 9, 14, 16, 56, 69, 70-72, 76, 77, 99,
100, 107; aesthetic, 20, 27, 72, 79, 83; physical,

68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 88, 96; social, 69, 70-72.
Objectivity, 8; and subjectivity, 12, 22, 27, 68,

78, 81, 83, 9p.
Order, 88, 89.
Organism, the organic, 7, 8, 9, 13, I4i 47. 48, 64,

69, 76, 82, 90.

Origins, 47; aesthetic, 47-65.
Ormond, A. T., 108.

Pattern, 19, 32, 59, 76, 89, 90, 93, 97, loi, 103.

Pierce, E., loi.

Plato, 68, no.

Play, 21, s6, 57, 62, 84, 85, 86.

Pleasure: aesthetic, 21, 22, 29, 30, 34, 78; and

pain, 12, 13, 81, 106, 107.
Proportion, 87, 88.
PuSer, E. D., 35, 93, 102.

Reality, 72, 79, 85.

Reconstruction, 29, 30, 33, 48, 49, 55, 90, 91,

108, III.
Reflective thought, 10, 11, 15, 28-30, 74, 75, 78,

79, 88, 100; and the aesthetic, 66, 67, 79.
Relief, 19, 33, 40, 41. 45. 89, 102, 103, 105.
Renaissance, 41-43.

Response, 14, 69, 70, 76, 77, 82, 85, 86, 106.
Restraint, 95.
Rhythm, 19, 30-32, 48, 58, 59, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94,

95, loi, 102, 103.
Romantic movement, 44, 45.
Royce, J., 30.

Santayana, G., 21, 24, 35, 81, 100.

Satisfaction, 12, 13, 29, 30, 31, 33, 50, 55, 61, 78,

99, 103, 107; "pause of," 30, 32, 34, 64, 72,

83, 97, 108, 109.
Schiller, F. C. S., no.

Selection, 8, 92.

Self, the, 12, 69, 70; the social, 69, 70, 72, 77,

100.
Self -exhibition, 79, 83, 84, 86.
Sensation, 10, 16, 17, i8, 67, 109.
" Shareableness," 22, 23.
Simplicity, 88.
Significant, the, 95.
Social, the, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 92.
Society, tyjies of, 48-57, 68.
Spencer and Gillen, 55.
Spencer, H., 25, 26, 65, 85, 96, 104, no.
Stetson, R. H., 31, 94.

Stimulation, 19, 33, 34. 41. 43. 45. S3. 89, 103. 107.
Stimulus, 14, 18, 19, 32, 48, 49, SI. 69. 70. 73. 98,

105.
Stuart, H. W., 9, 67.
Sturt, H., 73- ■

Sublime, the, 87, 99-101, 103, 105.
Subjectivity, 12, 22, 27, 68, 72, 74, 78, 99.
Substitution, 16, 90, 91-93, 97, 101, 102, 105.
Suggestion, 68, 76, 77.
Sully, J., 25, 104, 106.
Surprise, 105, 106.
Symmetry, 87, 88, 89, 93, 102.
Sympathy, 68, 76.

Tanner, A. E., 56-
Thomas, W. I., 62.
Tragic, the, 101-3, 105.
Tufts, J. H., 22, 78.

Ugly, the, 87, 106, 107.

Unity, in variety, 87, 88, 89; aesthetic, 83. 84, 90,

97, 100, 103, 108.
Universality, 22, 23, 68, 79.

Value, 7, 8, 27, 33, 67, 76. 108, no.
Veblen, T. B., 60.

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