Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/821

 that the resting eye's perception of form consists of a mass of motor feeling ideally represented. In other words, it is made up of a number of imperfectly distinguished imaginations of movement in different directions, etc. And these representative feelings are very various in character, since we are vaguely aware that any fixed line, for example, offers a choice of movement in two directions, and of an indefinite number of velocities. Now, if we conceive that the feelings of movement thus represented in a confused aggregate are distinctly pleasurable ones, it must follow that such a condition, of what I may call the motor imagination, will be a highly agreeable one. It will involve a vague consciousness of a wealth of motor experience and a rich area of selection. It has been said that the possibilities of enjoyment in valuable possessions, as wealth and friends, often count more than the amount of actual enjoyment we are ever likely to get out of them. This remark may apply to that recognition of the possibilities of pleasurable movement which every beautiful form supplies to the resting eye.

The capability of simultaneous local recognition by the eye would seem in this way greatly to enrich its enjoyment of form. Our appreciation of a beautiful line includes a transition from a state of actual movement with its definite motor feelings to a state of actual repose with the imagination of movement only, and of relatively indefinite feelings of movement.

To verify these deductions, it would be necessary to show that all agreeable forms, up to the most beautiful, do answer to pleasurable ocular movements. In a general way this will be found to be so. A beautiful figure is one which selects such elements of form, together with combinations of these, as supply the eye with the more agreeable varieties of motor experience already spoken of. The selection of curved lines, the preference for horizontal lines (which seems to be exemplified in the feeling for bilateral symmetry), the taste for continuous forms or contour arrangements, for the grouping of parts about a center and for symmetrical balance (which answer no loss to the natural conditions of easy movement than they do to the arrangements of the retina itself), all this seems to show how closely beauty of form is conditioned by the laws of agreeable movement.

At the same time, what we call a beautiful form is sometimes ready to sacrifice this pleasure of movement; and it does so just because it can command another kind of gratification—namely, an intellectual pleasure in the recognition of relations. To this new factor we may now pass. I have already remarked that the moving eye, capable of successive experiences only, would not attain to any very complex perceptions of relations of parts. The capability of the eye in the delicate discrimination of shades of direction and distance, and still more in the coördination of manifold details under some aspect of unity, seems to be inseparably bound up with the fact of