The Psychology of Beauty Part 2

What is the form of reflection for the Absolute, the Idea?

It would appear to be a combination of Unity and Totality-- self-completeness. An object, then, which should be self- complete from all possible points of view, to which could be applied the "form of reflection" for the Absolute, would, therefore, alone truly express it, and so alone fulfill the end of Beauty. The Idea would be there in its form; it would be shown to sense, and so first full expressed.

With this important modification of Hegel's definition of Beauty, which brings it into line with the point of view already won, I believe the way is at last opened from the traditional philosophy of aesthetics to a healthy and concrete psychological theory.

But must every self-complete object give rise to the aesthetic experience? An object is absolutely self-complete only for the perceiving subject; it is so, in other words, only when it produces a self-complete experience for that subject. If reconciliation of the warring elements of the universe is the end of Beauty it must take place not for, but in, the human personality; it must not be understood, but immediately, completely experienced; it should be realized in the subject of the aesthetic experience, the lover of beauty. The beautiful object would be not that which should show in outline form, or remind of, this Unity of the World, but which should create for the subject the moment of self- completeness; which should inform the aesthetic subject with that unity and self-completeness which are the "forms of reflection" of the Infinite. The subject should be not a mirror of perfection, but a state of perfection. Only in this sense does the concept of reconciliation come to its full meaning. Not because I see freedom, but because I am free; not because I think of G.o.d, or the Infinite, or the one, but because I am for the moment complete, at the highest point of energy and unity, does the aesthetic experience const.i.tute such a reconciliation.

Not because I behold the Infinite, but because I have, myself, a moment of perfection. Herein it is that our theory const.i.tutes a complete contradiction to all "expression" or "significant"

theories of the Beautiful, and does away with the necessity those theories are under of reading sermons into stones. The yellow primrose needs not to remind us of the harmony of the universe, or to have ulterior significance whatever, if it gives by its own direct simple stimulation a moment of Unity and Self- completeness. That immediate experience indeed contains in itself the "form of reflection" of the Absolute, and it is through this that we so often pa.s.s, in the enjoyment of Beauty, to the thought of the divine. But that thought is a corollary, a secondary effect, not an essential part of the aesthetic moment. There is a wonderful bit of unconscious aesthetics in the following pa.s.sage from Senancour, touching the "secret of relation" we have just a.n.a.lyzed.

"It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I pa.s.sed by some flowers placed breast- high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what a.n.a.logy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty.... I shall never inclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made."<1>

<1> Translation by Carleton Noyes: _The Enjoyment of Art_, 1903, p. 65.

Our philosophical definition of Beauty has thus taken final shape. The beautiful object possesses those qualities which bring the personality into a state of unity and self-completeness.

Lightly to case aside such a definition as abstract, vague, Empty, is no less short sighted than to treat the idea of the Absolute Will, of the Transcendental Reason, of the Eternal Love, as mere intellectual factors in the aesthetic experience.

It should not be criticised as giving "no objective account of the nature and origin of Beauty." The nature of Beauty is indicated in the definition; the origin of Beauty may be studied in its historical development; its reason for being is simply the desire of the human heart for the perfect moment.

Beauty is to bring unity and self-completeness into the personality. By what means? What causes can bring about this effect? When we enter the realm of causes and effects, however, we have already left the ground of philosophy, and it is fitting that the concepts which we have to use should be adapted to the empirical point of view. The personality, as dealt with in psychology, is but the psychophysical organism; and we need to know only how to translate unity and self-completeness into psychological terms.

The psychological organism is in a state of unity either when it is in a state of virtual congealment or emptiness, as in a trance or ecstasy; or when it is in a state of repose, without tendency to change. Secondly, the organism is self-complete when it is at the highest possible point of tone, of functional efficiency, of enhanced life. Then a combination of favorable stimulation and repose would characterize the aesthetic feeling.

But it may be said that stimulation and repose are contradictory concepts, and we must indeed admit that the absolute repose of the hypnotic trance is not aesthetic, because empty of stimulus.

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. The concept is familiar in pictorial composition and to some extent also in music and poetry, but here first appears as grounded in the very demand for the union of repose with activity.

Moreover, this requirement, which we have derived from the logical concepts of unity and totality, as translated into psychological terms, receives confirmation from the nature of organic life. It was the perfect moment that we sought, and we found it in the immediate experience of unity and self-completeness; and unity for a living being CAN only be equilibrium. Now it appears that an authoritative definition of the general nature of an organism makes it "so built, whether on mechanical principles or not, that every deviation from the equilibrium point sets up a tendency to return to it."<1> Equilibrium, in greater or less excursions from the centre, is thus the ultimate nature of organic life. The perfect equilibrium, that is, equilibrium with heightened tone, will then give the perfect moment.

<1> L.T. Hobhouse, _Mind in Evolution_.

The further steps of aesthetics are then toward a.n.a.lysis of the psychological effect of all the elements which enter into a work of art, with reference to their effect in producing stimulation or repose. What colors, forms, tones, emotions, ideas, favorably stimulate? What combinations of these bring to repose? All the modern studies in so-called physiological aesthetics, into the emotional and other--especially motor-- effects of color, tone-sensation, melodic sequence, simple forms, etc., find here there proper place.

A further important question, as to the fitting psychological designation of the aesthetic state, is now suggested. Some authorities speak of the aesthetic att.i.tude or activity, describing it as "sympathetic imitation" or "absorption;"

others of the aesthetic pleasure. But, according to our definition of the aesthetic experience as a combination of favorable stimulation with repose, this state, as involving "a distinctive feeling-tone and a characteristic trend of activity aroused by a certain situation,"<1> can be no other than an emotion. This view is confirmed by introspection; we speak of aesthetic activity and aesthetic pleasure, but we are conscious of a complete arrest, and sometimes of a very distinct divergence from pure pleasure. The experience is unique, it seems to defy description, to be intense, vivid, and yet--like itself alone. Any attempt to disengage special, already known emotions, even at the play or in hearing music, is often in vain, in just those moments when our excitement is most intense. But the hypothesis of a unique emotion, parallel to those of joy, fear, etc., and with a psychological basis as outlined, would account for these facts. The positive toning of the experience--what we call aesthetic pleasure--is due not only to the favorable stimulation, but also to the fact that the very antagonism of impulses which const.i.tutes repose heightens tone while it inhibits action. Thus the conditions of both factors of aesthetic emotion tend to induct pleasure.

<1> Baldwin's _Dict. Of Phil. And Psychol._ Art. "Emotion."

It is, then, clear that no specific aesthetic pleasure need be sought. The very phrase, indeed, is a misnomer, since all pleasure is qualitatively the same, and differentiated only by the specific activities which it accompanies. It is also to be noted that those writers on aesthetics who have dwelt most on aesthetic pleasure have come in conclusion only to specific activities, like the "imitation" of Groos, for instance.

In the light of the just-won definition of aesthetic emotion, it is interesting to examine some of the well-known modern aesthetic theories.

Lipps defines the aesthetic experience as a "thrill of sympathetic feeling," Groos as "sympathetic imitation," evidently a.s.suming that pleasure accompanies this. But there are many feelings of sympathy, and joyful ones, which do not belong to the aesthetic realm. In the same way, not all "imitation" is accompanied by pleasure, and not all of that falls within the generally accepted aesthetic field. If these definitions were accepted as they stand, all our rejoicings with friends, all our inspiration from a healthy, magnetic presence must be included in it. It is clear that further limitation is necessary; but if to this sympathetic imitation, this living through in sympathy, we add the demand for repose, the necessary limitation is made. Physical exercise in general, or the instinctive imitation of energetic, or easy (in general FAVORABLE) movements, is pleasurable, indeed, but the experience is not aesthetic,--as is quite clear, indeed, to common sense,--and it is not aesthetic because it is the contradiction of repose. A particular case of the transformation of pleasurable physical exercise into an aesthetic activity is seen in the experience of symmetrical or balanced form; any moderate, smooth exercise of the eye is pleasurable, but this alone induces a state of the whole organism combining repose with stimulation.

The theories of Kulpe and Santayana, while they definitely mark out the ground, seem to me in need of addition. "Absorption in the object in respect to its bare quality and conformation" does not, of course, give the needed information, for objective beauty, of the character of this conformation or form. But yet, it might be said that the content of beauty might conceivably be deduced from the psychological conditions of absorption. In the same way, Santayana's "Beauty as objectified pleasure," or pleasure as the quality of a thing, is neither a determination of objective beauty nor a sufficient description of the psychological state.

Yet a.n.a.lysis of those qualities in the thing that cause us to make our pleasure a quality of it would supplement the definition sufficiently and completely in the sense of our own formula. Why do we regard pleasure as the quality of a thing? Because there is something in the thing that makes us spread, as it were, our pleasure upon it. This is that which fixates us, arrests us, upon it,--which can be only the elements that make for repose.

Guyau, however, comes nearest to our point of view. "The beautiful is a perception or an action which stimulates life within us under its three forms simultaneously (i.e., sensibility, intelligence, and will) and produces pleasure by the swift consciousness of this general stimulation."<1> It is from this general stimulation that Guyau explains the aesthetic effect of his famous drink of milk among mountain scenes. But such general stimulation might accompany successful action of any kind, and thus the moral and the aesthetic would fall together. That M. Guyau is so successful in his a.n.a.lysis is due rather to the fact that just this diffused stimulation is likely to come from such exercise as is characterized by the mutual checking of antagonistic impulses producing an equilibrium. The diffusion of stimulation would be our formula for the aesthetic state only if interpreted as stimulation arresting action.

<1> _Problemes de l'Esthetique Contemporaine_ 1902, p. 77.

The diffusion of stimulation, the equilibrium of impulses, life- enhancement through repose!--this is the aesthetic experience.

But how, then, it will be asked, are we to interpret the temporal arts? A picture or a statue maybe understood through this formula, but hardly a drama or a symphony. If the form of the one is symmetry, hidden or not, would not the form of the other be represented by a straight line? That which has beginning, middle, and end is not static but dynamic.

Let us consider once more the concept of equilibrium. Inhibition of action through antagonistic impulses, or action returning upon itself, we have defined it; and the line cannot be drawn sharply between these types. The visual a.n.a.logue for equilibrium may be either symmetrical figure or circle; the excursion from the centre may be either the swing of the pendulum or the sweep of the planet. The RETURN is the essential. Now it is a commonplace of criticism--though the significance of the dictum has never been sufficiently seen--that the great drama, novel, or symphony does return upon itself. The excursion is merely longer, of a different order of impulses from that of the picture. The last note is the only possible answer to the first; it contains the first. The last scene has meaning only as the satisfaction of the first. The measure of the perfection of a work of temporal art is thus its IMPLICIT character. The end is contained in the beginning--that is the meaning of "inevitableness."

That the constraining power of drama or symphony is just this sense of urgency, of compulsion, from one point to another, is but confirmation of this view. The temporal art tries ever to pa.s.s from first to last, which is first. It yearns for unity.

The dynamic movement of the temporal arts is cyclic, which is ultimately static, of the nature of equilibrium. It is only in the wideness of the sweep that the dynamic repose of poetry and music differs from the static activity of picture and statue.

Thus the Nature of Beauty is in the relation of means to an end; the means, the possibilities of stimulation in the motor, visual, auditory, and purely ideal fields; the end, a moment of perfection, of self-complete unity of experience, of favorable stimulation with repose. Beauty is not perfection; but the beauty of an object lies in its permanent possibility of creating the perfect moment. The experience of this moment, the union of stimulation and repose, const.i.tutes the unique aesthetic emotion.

III THE AESTHETIC REPOSE

III THE AESTHETIC REPOSE

THE popular interest in scientific truth has always had its hidden spring in a desire for the marvelous. The search for the philosopher's stone has done as much for chemistry as the legend of the elixir of life for exploration and geographical discovery. From the excitements of these suggestions of the occult, the world settled down into a reasonable understanding of the facts of which they were but the enlarged and grotesque shadows.

So it has been with physics and physiology, and so also, preeminently, with the science of mental life. Mesmerism, hypnotism, the facts of the alteration, the multiplicity, and the annihilation of personality have each brought us their moments of pleasurable terror, and pa.s.sed thus into the field of general interest. But science can accept no broken chains.

For all the thrill of mystery, we may not forget that the hypnotic state is but highly strung attention,--at the last turn of the screw,--and that the alternation of personality is after all no more than the highest power of variability of mood. In regard to the annihilation of the sense of personality, it may be said that no connection with daily experience is at first apparent. Scientists, as well as the world at large, have been inclined to look on the loss of the sense of personality as pathological; and yet it may be maintained that it is nevertheless the typical form of those experiences we ourselves regard as the most valuable.

The loss of personality! In that dread thought there lies, to most of us, all the sting of death and the victory of the grave.

It seems, with such a fate in store, that immortality were futile, and life itself a mockery. Yet the idea, when dwelt upon, a.s.sumes an aspect of strange familiarity; it is an old friend, after all. Can we deny that all our sweetest hours are those of self-forgetfulness? The language of emotion, religious, aesthetic, intellectually creative, testifies clearly to the fading of the consciousness of self as feeling nears the white heat. Not only in the speechless, stark immobility of the pathological "case," but in all the stages of religious ecstasy, aesthetic pleasure, and creative inspiration, is to be traced what we know as the loss of the feeling of self. Bernard of Clairvaux dwells on "that ecstasy of deification in which the individual disappears in the eternal essence as the drop of water in a cask of wine." Says Meister Eckhart, "Thou shalt sink away from they selfhood, though shalt flow into His self- possession, the very thought of Thine shall melt into His Mine;"

and St. Teresa, "The soul, in thus searching for its G.o.d, feels with a very lively and very sweet pleasure that is is fainting almost quiet away."

Still more striking is the language of aesthetic emotion.

Philosopher and poet have but one expression for the universal experience. Says Keats in the "Ode to a Nightingale:"--

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethewards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thy happiness."

And in Schopenhauer we read that he who contemplates the beautiful "forgets even his individuality, his will, and only continues to exist as the pure subject, the clear mirror of the object."

But not only the religious enthusiast and the worshiper of beauty "lose themselves" in ecstasy. The "fine frenzy" of the thinker is typical. From Archimedes, whose life paid the forfeit of his impersonal absorption; from Socrates, musing in one spot from dawn to dawn, to Newton and Goethe, there is but one form of the highest effort to penetrate and to create.

Emerson is right in saying of the genius, "His greatness consists in the fullness in which an ecstatic state is realized in him."

The temporary evaporation of the consciousness of one's own Personality is then decidedly not a pathological experience.

It seems the condition, indeed, and recognized as such in popular judgment, of the deepest feeling and the highest achievement. Perhaps it is the very a.s.sumption of this condition in our daily thoughts that has veiled the psychological problem it presents. We opine, easily enough, that great deeds are done in forgetfulness of self. But why should we forget ourselves in doing great deeds? Why not as well feel in every act its reverberation on the self,--the renewed a.s.surance that it is I who can? Why not, in each aesthetic thrill, awake anew to the consciousness of myself as ruler in a realm of beauty? Why not, in the rush of intellectual production, glory that "my mind to me a kingdom is"? And yet the facts are otherwise: in proportion to the intensity and value of the experience is its approach to the objective, the impersonal, the ecstatic state. Then how explain this anomaly? Why should religious, aesthetic, and intellectual emotion be accompanied in varying degrees by the loss of self-consciousness? Why should the sense of personality play us so strange a trick as to vanish, at the moment of seemingly greatest power, in the very shadow of its own glory?

If now we put the most obvious question, and ask, in explanation of its escapades, what the true nature of this personality is, we shall find ourselves quite out of our reckoning on the vast sea of metaphysics. To know what personality IS, "root and all, and all in all," is to "know what G.o.d and man is." Fortunately, our problem is much more simple. It is not the personality, its reality, its meaning, that vanishes; no, nor even the psychological system of dispositions. We remain, in such a moment of ecstasy, as persons, what we were before. It is the FEELING of personality that has faded; and to find out in what this will-o'-the-wisp feeling of personality resides is a task wholly within the powers of psychological a.n.a.lysis. Let no one object that the depth and value of experience seem to disintegrate under the psychologist's microscope. The place of the full-orbed personality in a world of n.o.ble ends is not affected by the possibility that the centre of its conscious crystallization may be found in a single sensation.

The explanation, then, of this apparent inconsistency--the fading away of self in the midst of certain most important experiences-- must lie in the nature of the feeling of personality. What is that feeling? On what is it based? How can it be described?

The difficulties of introspection have led many to deny the possibility of such self-fixation. The fleeting moment pa.s.ses, and we grasp only an idea or a feeling; the Ego has slipped away like a drop of mercury under the fingers. Like the hero of the German poet, who wanted his queue in front,

"Then round and round, and out and in, All day that puzzled sage did spin; In vain; it mattered not a pin; The pigtail hung behind him,"

when I turn round upon myself to catch myself in the act of thinking, I can never lay hold on anything but a sensation. I may peel off, like the leaves of an artichoke, my social self,-- my possessions and positions, my friends, my relatives; my active self,--my books and implements of work; my clothes; even my flesh, and sit in my bones, like Sydney Smith,--the I in me retreating ever to an inner citadel; but I must stop with the feeling that something moves in there. That is not what my self IS, but what the elusive sprite feels like when I have got my finger on him. In daily experience, however, it is unnecessary to proceed to such extremities. The self, at a given moment of consciousness, is felt as one group of elements which form a foreground. The second group is, we say, before the attention, and is not at that moment felt as self; while the first group is vague, undifferentiated, not attended to, but felt. Any element in this background can detach itself and come into the foreground of attention. I become conscious at this moment, for instance, of the weight of my shoulders as they rest on the back of my chair: that sensation, however, belongs to my self no more than does the sensation of the smoothness of the paper on which my hand rests. I know I am a self, because I can pa.s.s, so to speak, between the foreground and the background of my consciousness. It is the feeling of transition that gives me the negative and positive of my circuit; and this feeling of transition, hunted to its lair, reveals itself as nothing more nor less than a motor sensation felt in the sense organs which adapt themselves to the new conditions. I look on that picture and on this, and know that they are two, because the change in the adaptation of my sense organs to their objects has been felt. I close my eyes and think of near and far, and it is the change in the sensations from my eye muscles that tells me I have pa.s.sed between the two; or, to express it otherwise, that it is in me the two have succeeded each other. While the self in its widest sense, therefore, is co-extensive with consciousness, the distinctive feeling of self as opposed to the elements in consciousness which represent the outer world is based on those bodily sensations which are connected with the relations of objects.

My world--the foreground of my consciousness--would fall in on me and crush me, if I could not hold it off by just this power to feel it different from my background; and it is felt as different through the motor sensations involved in the change of my sense organs in pa.s.sing from one to the other. The condition of the feeling of transition, and hence of the feeling of personality, is then the presence in consciousness of at least two possible objects of attention; and the formal consciousness of self might be schematized as a straight line connecting two points, in which one point represents the foreground, and the other the background, of consciousness.

If we now accept this view, and ask under what conditions the sense of self may be lost, the answer is at once suggested.

It will happen when the "twoness" disappears, so that the line connecting and separating the two objects in our scheme drops out or is indefinitely decreased. When background or foreground tends to disappear or to merge either into the other, or when background or foreground makes an indissoluble unity or unbreakable circle, the content of consciousness approaches absolute unity. There is no "relating" to be done, no "transition" to be made. The condition, then, for the feeling of personality is no longer present, and there results a feeling of complete unity with the object of attention; and if this object of attention is itself without parts or differences, there results an empty void, Nirvana.

Suppose that I gaze, motionless, at a single bright light until all my bodily sensations have faded. Then one of the "points"