Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/521

507 the energies we lend them from the suggestions they themselves contain, and our attribution of beauty to them in proportion to the harmonious interplay and equilibrium of these energies, is a very vivid and fruitful phrasing of our immediate experience. In fact, the immediacy of the interpretation which the general terms of Einfühlung enable us to reach has been held as a counsel of perfection for the procedure of æsthetics in general, and as the open way of escape from a psychological (i.e., an artificially constructed) æsthetics to a real unreconstructed life experience. This seems to me a very important parting of the ways in the quest for the "architectural idea," and in the methods of æsthetic inquiry in general.

Now probably most of us have held in one form or another the doctrine that Beauty consists in unity, self-completeness, perfection, inner harmony, mutual agreement of intentions in a given manifoldness. The establishment of this thesis, which places beauty in the world of ultimate meanings, which indeed gives the general definition of the nature of beauty, belongs to the philosophical discipline. The problem of beauty is a philosophical problem but the problem of æsthetics is not the problem of beauty. The problem of æsthetics is to answer the only questions which are—after the establishment of that thesis—of conceivable interest: accepting this inner harmony of intentions in a work of art, to find out in what these intentions consist, how they are constituted, how they come to be what they are. These questions I believe only the most definite and detailed psychological and physiological studies can answer. To take a very simple instance, this harmony of contributing elements may be supposed to obtain in the case of such an architectural example as the Notre Dame at Paris. The so-called inner harmony of intentions is admitted to be complete, and we rejoice in it. Now if the scale of this object undergoes a metamorphosis, the internal relations remain the same—yet the model of Notre Dame on a table has for me completely lost its æsthetic values, or at least it has fallen almost below the æsthetic threshold. The only possible interpretation of this fact is that to those intentions the spectator was a silent partner with a controlling