Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/36

Rh systems of lines and shapes, experience bodily tensions and impulses relative to the forms which you apprehend, the rising and sinking, rushing, colliding, reciprocal checking, etc. of shapes. And these are connected with your own activities in apprehending them; the form, indeed, or law of connection in any object, is, they say, just what depends, for being apprehended, upon activity of body-and-mind on your part. And the feelings and associations of such activity are what you automatically use, with all their associated significances, to compose the feeling which is for you the feeling of the object or the object as an embodied feeling.

This theory gives a very vivid illustration of the way in which a feeling and an object can become identified.

With regard to this theory in this very limited form, I will make four observations.

i. In dealing with the whole range of aesthetic imagination I very greatly diStrust all highly specialised explanations. I have seen books which said that all