Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/523

509 That content for the conceptions of Einfühlung itself must be sought within the psychological field is rather borne out by the procedure of Lipps. I am certainly not the first to point out that his development of Einfühlung rests on a kind of surreptitious psychology. There are two steps in his deduction of the energies of an object.

1. For the abstract shape, the so-called general apperceptive Einfühlung (allgemeine apperzeptive Einfühlung), i.e., the energies involved in simple apprehension, the "formschaffende Tätigkeit." 2. For real solid objects, the empirical or Natur-Einfühlung. As an example, Lipps's own phrase "What is on high, I have continually observed to fall down" and his "All my tendencies to let things happen in my thoughts in a certain way, arise in nature."

That is, the 'æsthetic mechanics,' the forces which I acknowledge in an object and make a part of myself, are a combination of perception and association. But why do I separate them? As Volkelt says somewhere, the moment I perceive a thing for what it is, the association is already behind me. And that brings me to the central point of my short theme. Why go around Robin Hood's barn, as the children say, when we have at hand a single rubric of pure psychology which can cover the whole field? So long as it was the afferent elements alone which were fully recognized in perception, it might be truly objected that the vivid sense of personal implication in the æsthetic experience of architecture, for instance, and music in particular, could not be done full justice to or at least only by the admission of certain groups of movement sensations our very awareness of which is often denied. But now that we seem to be coming to envisage perception as a matter primarily of response and reactions, with room in it for all possible fusions of the most far reaching associations (all Lipps's "tendencies to let things happen in my thought"), there is no need for going further afield for the key to our 'architectural idea.'

Naturally I am not unaware of previous suggestions, made for example by our President, of the application of the results