Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/577

 GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty. 561 social impulses : " social objects . . . are diffuse and abstract : . . . the great emotions that go with them are not immediately transmutable into beauty ". Smell, taste and touch are also of small importance for aesthetics. Sights and sounds offer the greatest qualitative differences, and are the most easily objectified of all sensations : their contribution to the sum of beauty is pro- portionately large. Here, however, we come upon a psychological difficulty. We are dealing with the materials of beauty. Now sights and sounds, as sensations, and even (this is at any rate true of sounds) as isolated sensation complexes, have very little affective tone ; nothing like so much as smells and tastes. Yet sense feeling, the author says, enters largely into the aesthetic enjoyment of painting and music ; there is a ' sensuous beauty ' in both. It may be, perhaps, that with recurrence of the primitive act of objectification the primitive sense feelings, pleasure in mere sight and mere sound, also recur in the civilised mind, however threadbare we may have worn the sights and sounds that we use for the ordinary communi- cation of ideas. This appears to be the writer's view ; he points to the sensuous delights of children and savages (pp. 79, 163). It may be, however, that what purports here to be sense feeling is in reality a much reduced emotion ; at least the thought is suggested by such phrases as ' royal ' purple and ' angry ' red, or the author's ' tender ' blue of the sky (p. 100). The question is worth explicit discussion. A similar difficulty confronts us at the outset of the chapter on Form. I have said that Dr. Santayana defines beauty as objectified emotion. This is surely the only correct formulation from the psychological standpoint. The sense feeling is not objectified : the emotion is the simplest process in the hierarchy of affective states that has objective reference. And it seems to represent the writer's general position. When he. speaks of objectifying the ' feeling ' that accompanies ' perception ' it is the perception of a concrete thing, the assimilation, that he has in mind ; else he could hardly write that " there is in the mere per- ceptibility of a thing a certain prophecy of its beauty ". Now, however, his terminology misleads him. Physiologically, the per- ception of form is conditioned by the associative network of retinal local signs and muscular sensations. But this does not allow us to make muscular tensions the immediate vehicle of the aesthetic judgment. The "indifference and sameness of sensation," we read, " in whatever direction some accident moves the eye, accounts very well for the emotional quality of the circle ". " The comfort and economy that comes from muscular balance " is in some cases " the source of the value of symmetry ". Bather must it be true that, while no sensibly unpleasant form can ever be aesthetically pleasing, the aesthetic pleasure in form is due to some emotion (restfulness, ease, satisfaction) which the contempla- tion of form sets up. How it came about that, with developing 36