Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/44

Rh same ultimate basis, but with a method and purpose of its own, and having for its goal a different type of satisfaction from that of ascertained fact.

This being so, we have the mind working freely upon the entire resources of our direct and indirect experience, when our imagination is presenting us with an object as the embodiment of our pleasant feeling. And we do not need a special doctrine of how we come to attach what we feel to the object any more than of how we come to attach to it qualities of colour, shape, or sound. Take a square or a cube — the simplest possible cases. Four-square with out a flaw; four-square to all the winds that blow; the same in all directions; almost impossible to upset, and so forth. The shape is full of feeling for us the moment it is seen imaginatively — that is, freely.

So far, we have got something like this. The aesthetic attitude is an attitude in which we imaginatively contemplate an