Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/25

10 but what is there for us to look at, and that is what we perceive or imagine, which can only be the immediate appearance or the semblance. This is the fundamental doctrine of the aesthetic semblance. Man is not civilised, aesthetically, till he has learned to value the semblance above the reality. It is indeed, as we shall see, in one sense the higher reality — the soul and life of things, what they are in themselves.

So far the aesthetic attitude seems to be something like this: preoccupation with a pleasant feeling, embodied in an object which can be contemplated, and so obedient to the laws of an object; and by an object is meant an appearance presented to us through perception or imagination. Nothing which does not appear can count for the aesthetic attitude.

Now, no doubt, this attitude is actually met with in very many different degrees, and the cases on the border-line are very difficult to distinguish. I should say that there is probably some trace of the aesthetic attitude in almost all pleasant feeling.