Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/32

Rh and, of course, on the degree of life and structure which a thing actually possesses. In principle, form and substance are one, like soul and body. But we continue to contrast them as we do soul and body, because there is always some failure to bring them quite together, perhaps on their own part, and certainly on ours.

“Degree of life and structure which a thing actually possesses.” That affects its aesthetic quality less than one might think, for this reason.

The “object” in the aesthetic attitude, we saw, can only be the appearance, not what we call the real thing, what we say we know about. Therefore our imagination, or imaginative perception, has a practically infinite choice of objects, because all appearances of things, in any context or connection, are open to it. Now, obviously, the possibilities of discerning “form” vary as much as the apparent objects do. A cloud, e.g., we know to be a mass of cold wet vapour; but taken as we see it with the sun on it, it has quite