CONCLUSION (EVOLUTIONAL)
SOME of my Readers, not satisfied by the answer implicit in the last
chapter and indeed in the whole of this little book, may ask a final
question concerning our subject. Not: What is the use of Art? since,
as we have seen, Art has many and various uses both to the
individual and to the community, each of which uses is independent
of the attainment of Beauty.
The remaining question concerns the usefulness of the very demand
for Beauty, of that _Aesthetic Imperative_ by which the other uses
of art are more or less qualified or dominated. In what way, the
Reader may ask, has sensitiveness to Beauty contributed to the
survival of mankind, that it should not only have been preserved and
established by evolutional selection, but invested with the
tremendous power of the pleasure and pain alternative?
The late William James, as some readers may remember, placed
musical pleasure between sentimental love and sea-sickness as
phenomena unaccountable by any value for human survival, in fact
masteries, if not paradoxes, of evolution.
The riddle, though not necessarily the mystery, does not consist in
the survival of the aesthetic instinct of which the musical one is a
mere sub-category, but in the origin and selectional establishment of
its elementary constituents, say for instance space-perception and
empathy, both of which exist equally outside that instinct which is a
mere compound of them and other primary tendencies. For given
space-perception and empathy and their capacity of being felt as
satisfactory or unsatisfactory, the aesthetic imperative is not only
intelligible but inevitable. Instead therefore of asking: Why is there a
preference for what we call Beauty? we should have to ask: why has
perception, feeling, logic, imagination, come to be just what it is?
Indeed why are our sense-organs, our bodily structure and chemical
composition, what they are; and why do they exist at all in
contradistinction to the ways of being of other living or other
inanimate things? So long as these elementary facts continue
shrouded in darkness or taken for granted, the genesis and
evolutional reason of the particular compound which we call
aesthetic preference must remain only one degree less mysterious
than the genesis and evolutional reason of its psychological
components.
Meanwhile all we can venture to say is that as satisfaction derived
from shapes we call _beautiful,_ undoubtedly involves intense,
complex, and reiterative mental activities, as it has an undeniable
power for happiness and hence for spiritual refreshment, and
as it moreover tends to inhibit most of the instincts whose
superabundance can jeopardise individual and social existence, the
capacity for such aesthetic satisfaction, once arisen, would be
fostered in virtue of a mass of evolutional advantages which are as
complex and difficult to analyse, but also as deep-seated and
undeniable, as itself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. _Lipps._ Raumaesthetik, Leipzig, 1897.
" Aesthetik, vol. I. part ii., Leipzig, 1906.
II. _Karl Groos._ Aesthetik, Giessen, 1892.
" Der Aesthetische Genuss, Giessen, 1902.
III. _Wundt._ Physiologische Psychologie (5th Edition, 1903), vol.
III. pg. 107 to 209. But the whole volume is full of indirect
suggestion on aesthetics.
IV. _Münsterberg._ The Principles of Art Education, New York,
1905. (Statement of Lipps' theory in physiological terms.)
V. _Külpe._ Der gegenwärtige Stand der experimentellen
Aesthetik, 1907.
VI. _Vernon Lee and Anstruther-Thomson._ Beauty and Ugliness,
1912 (contains abundant quotations from most of the above works
and other sources).
VII. _Ribot._ Le Rôle latent des Images Motrices. Revue
Philosophique, March 1912.
VIII. _Witasek._ Psychologie der Raumwahrnehmung des Auges
(1910). These two last named are only indirectly connected with
visual aesthetics.
For art-evolutional questions consult:
IX. _Haddon._ Evolution in Art, 1895.
X. _Yrjö Hirn._ Origins of Art, Macmillan, 1900.
XI. _Levinstein._ Kinderzeichnungen, Leipzig, 1905.
XII. _Loewy._ Nature in early Greek Art (translation), Duckworth,
1907.
XIII. _Delia Seta._ Religione e Arte Figurata, Rome, 1912.
XIV. _Spearing._ The Childhood of Art, 1913.
XV. _Jane Harrison._ Ancient Art and Ritual, 1913.
INDEX
Aesthetic:
aridity, 136-7;
imperative, 99-100;
irradiation, 147-52;
purification, 149-52;
responsiveness, active nature of, 128-36;
habit and familiarity affecting, 134-6
Altamira cave frescoes, 95
Art:
differential characteristic of, 116-18;
non-aesthetic aims of, 99-100, 137-8; utility of, 153-5
Aspect:
aesthetics concerned with, 15, 21, 105;
shape the determining feature of, 26-8
Attention, a factor distinguishing perception from sensation, 32
Balfour, H., 95
Beautiful:
aesthetic irradiation proceeding from use of adjective, 147-8;
attitude implied by use of adjective, 2-7, 18-19;
empathy the chief factor of preference, 67-8;
implies desire for reiterated perception, 53-4
Botticelli, 83
Brahms' _German Requiem,_ 150
Browning's _Abt Vogler,_ 141
Coleridge's _Ode to Dejection,_ 131
Colour, passive reception of, 23-4, 29
Contemplative satisfaction marking aesthetic attitude, 8-15
Correggio's _Danae,_ 151
Cubic Existence:
perception of, 85;
pictorial suggestion of, importance attached to, discussed, 101-5
_Discobolus,_ 115
Einfühlung, 59;
misinterpretations of, 66-7
Emotion, storage and transfer of, 139-46
Empathy, 61-69;
complexity of movements of lines, 78-83;
movements of lines, 70-77;
second element of shape-perception, 59-60
Extension existing in perception, 35-8
Fechner, 130
Hildebrand, 102, 118
Inner Mimicry, 74-5
James, W., 153
Keats' _Grecian Urn,_ 77
Levinstein, 96
Lipps, 66
Locomotion of Things, distinction between, and empathic
movement of lines, 111-16
Lotze, 66
Mantegna, 82
Memory:
a factor distinguishing perception from sensation, 32;
in perception, 40-1
Michel Angelo, 114, 122
Movement of Lines, distinction between, and locomotion of Things,
111-16; _see also_ Empathy
Object of Perception, subject's activities merged in, 57, 58
Perception:
active process involved in, 29-34, 128-9;
distinguished from sensation, 32;
subject and object of, 55-60
Raphael's _Heliodorus,_ 119
Relaxation an element of form-perception, 42
Rembrandt, 122
Rythm, 42-5
Semper, hypothesis regarding shape-preference, 94
Sensations:
distinguished from perceptions, 32;
perception of relation between, 29-30
Shape:
character of, 78-83;
contemplation of, its intermittent but recurrent character, 106-10;
determines contemplation of an aspect, 26-8;
elements of, 35-47;
Empathy an element of perception of, 59;
facility and difficulty of grasping, 48-54;
a perception, 29-34;
practical causes regarding evolution of, 90-4;
preference, its evolution, 94-7;
and Things, their co-operation, 117-27;
thinking away from, to Things, 131-2, 84-9
Sound, passive reception of, 23-4, 29
Subject of perception, extent of awareness of self, 57-9
Symmetry, 42-3
Tension, an element of form-perception, 42
Things and Shapes, their cooperation, 117-27;
thoughts about, entering into shape-contemplation, 84-9
Third Dimension, locomotor nature of knowledge of, 85-6, 101
Titchener, 59
Vinci, Leonardo da, 83, 145-6
Vischer, 66
Watts, G. F., 46
Whole and Parts, perception of relation of, 48-54
Wilde's _Salome,_ 150
Wundt, 42, 66