Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/49

34 cut off one element of the commonplace meaning of expression. We must not suppose that we first have a disembodied feeling, and then set out to find an embodiment adequate to it. In a word, imaginative expression creates the feeling in creating its embodiment, and the feeling so created not merely cannot be otherwise expressed, but cannot otherwise exist, than in and through the embodiment which imagination has found for it.

When we say then, that the aesthetic attitude is contemplative, we do not mean much more than that in it there is always an appearance before us, and that it is in the character and detail of this appearance that we find the gratification of an em bodied feeling. We do not mean to deny that throughout, from beginning to end, from James’s example onwards and upwards, imagination is active and creative, in other words, that the mind is freely reconstructing and remodelling all that perception presents to it in the direction which promises the maximum of “form.”