Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/31

16 parts, not leaving out the way in which this affects the parts themselves; then you find that the form becomes (as a lawyer would say) “very material”; not merely outlines and shapes, but all the sets of gradations and variations and connections that make anything what it is — the life, soul, and movement of the object. And more than this, every form, which you might be inclined to contrast with matter, has behind it a further form in the matter itself; for this determines, as we say, “what you can do with it,” with clay or bronze or marble or oil or water-colour, with the string-vibration or the Greek or English tongue; the order and connection of the parts of these stuffs are a form which determines the more artificial shape you can give them, say, in works of art.

Bearing in mind this graded distinction, we can easily see the rights and* wrongs of applying such terms as “form” and “formal” to any experience. It all depends on the degree of insight with which the object of experience is appreciated.