The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics

LET us now examine some of these relations, not in the genealogical or hierarchic order assigned to them by experimental psychology, but in so far as they constitute the element...

DURING the Middle Ages and up to recent times the chief task of painting has been, ostensibly, the telling and re-telling of the same Scripture stories; and, incidentally, the t...

OUR examination has thus proceeded from aesthetic contemplation to the work of Art, which seeks to secure and satisfy it while furthering some of life's various other claims. We...

_THE mountain rises._ What do we mean when we employ this form of words? Some mountains, we are told, have originated in an _upheaval._ But even if this particular mountain did,...

THE necessities of analysis and exposition have led us from the Shape to the Thing, from aesthetic contemplation to discursive and practical thinking. But, as the foregoing chap...

HAVING settled upon a particular point of view as the one he liked best, he remained there in contemplation of the aspect it afforded him. Had he descended another twenty minute...

Why this could not be the case, will be more and more apparent in my remaining chapters. And, in order to make those coming chapters easier to grasp, I may as well forestall and...

ANY tendency to Empathy is perpetually being checked by the need for practical thinking. We are made to think in the most summary fashion from one to another of those grouped po...

IN dealing with familiarity as a multiplying factor of aesthetic appreciation, I have laid stress on its effect in facilitating the perception and the empathic interpretation of...

In dealing with the _ground_ upon which we perceive our red and black patches to be extended, I have already pointed out that our operations of measuring and comparing are not a...

IN the contemplation of the _Aspect_ before him, what gave that aesthetic man the most immediate and undoubted pleasure was its colour, or, more correctly speaking, its colours....

THIS little book, like the great branch of mental science to which it is an introduction, makes no attempt to "form the taste" of the public and still less to direct the doings...

But life has little leisure for contemplation; it demands _recognition,_ inference and readiness for active adaptation. Or rather life forces us to deal with shapes mainly inasm...

WE have thus defined the word _Beautiful_ as implying an attitude of contemplative satisfaction, marked by a feeling, sometimes amounting to an _emotion,_ of admiration; and so...

IN my example of the Rising Mountain, I have been speaking as if Empathy invested the shapes we look at with only one mode of activity at a time. This, which I have assumed for...

AMONG the facts which Painting is set to tell us about things, the most important, after cubic existence, is Locomotion. Indeed in the development of the race as well as in that...

WHY should this be the case? Briefly, because colours (and sounds) as such are forced upon us by external stimulation of our organs of sight and hearing, neither more nor less t...

BUT before proceeding to this additional factor in shape-perception, namely that of Empathic Interpretation, I require to forestall an objection which my Reader has doubtless be...

THE storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion explain yet another fact, with which indeed I began this little book: namely that the word _Beautiful_ has been extended from whate...

SOME of my Readers, not satisfied by the answer implicit in the last chapter and indeed in the whole of this little book, may ask a final question concerning our subject. Not: W...

TO explain how art in general, and any art in particular, succeeds in reconciling these contradictory demands, I must remind the Reader of what I said (p. 93) about the satisfac...