Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/92

82 naïvely forces on our attention. In other words, in the best periods of art, form only disguises itself, becomes more a matter of imaginative reconstruction, and appeals to a finer kind of æsthetic perception. One may add that every now and again the artist will distinctly aim at satisfying the eye's feeling for form by what may almost seem a childish device. Even a Turner does not disdain to please the eye by introducing into his pictures accidental repetitions of form in different objects.

All good art thus does homage to the principle of form. One may even go further, and say that the characteristic effect of asymmetry, illustrated in many Japanese designs, is really due to a just feeling for form. Like discords and occasional suspensions of tone interval and equal time in music, such irregularities owe their piquancy to the very sense of a law that is broken, though not violently, but, so to speak, in childish freakishness.

In this brief analysis of the direct factor in pleasing visual form, I have regarded the immediate activity of the eye as something ultimate, only referring now and again to the effects of habit in facilitating certain kinds of motor activity. But modern psychological ideas will enable us to explain to some extent how the eye has come to be so constituted as to take pleasure in the kinds of activity just described. There is no room here for more than a brief elucidation of this aspect of the subject.

The doctrine of evolution leads us to view an organ of perception, together with its customary modes of action, as slowly determined by the action of the environment and the needs of practical life. A part of this operation goes on in the individual life, having as its result the selection of the habitual actions as the most easy and most agreeable. A part requires the life of the race for its carrying out, and has for its product a certain innate structure and disposition. The modes of agreeable visual perception illustrate these processes of adaptation to the conditions of practical life. Thus, as I have already hinted in passing, the eye's preference for the horizontal direction, for symmetrical movements of convergence, and so on, may possibly be explained as the result of habits determined by the greater utility of these particular movements. And it is probable, as Wundt suggests, that the innate peculiarities of the eye's mechanism which favor certain kinds of movement, as horizontal, and those from the center of the field, are themselves the result of long processes of racial adaptation.

What applies to the most natural and agreeable modes of ocular movement, applies also to the more pleasurable modes of the higher intellectual appreciation of form. The very feeling for unity of form in any shape is probably related to those deep wants of our existence