Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/39

24 all these detailed auxiliaries, and would in fact be impeded by them.

One cannot believe that these lines appeal to us through bodily movements.

iii. A good example is the case of movements of the eye. It has been supposed that when we take pleasure in a graceful curve, our eye is executing this same curve, “that we feel pleasure in this movement, or in the ease of it, and turn this pleasure into a quality of the object whose outlines we follow.” Well, it simply is not so. The eye in following a curve moves with jerks and in straight lines. “The muscles of the eye are mere scene-shifters.” The curve is an object of perception, and the character with which our imagination invests it comes, no doubt, from something in our experience. But there is no possible reason, with the whole world of experience to draw upon, why it should come from the movement of our eyes, and,