Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/55

40 country dance. This reminds us of the theory of the rising mountain we referred to in the last lecture.

In all these objects of aesthetic feeling, whose pleasurableness I have ventured to call a priori, we have what might be called the simplest formal character. The three characteristics of aesthetic objects which we began by laying down in the last lecture, are here plain and obvious, stability, relevance, community, rooted in the character of the mere abstract pattern which we perceive or in which we are absorbed (as in the rhythm of the dance). Fast or slow, simple or intricate, self-completing or interrupted — all these characters seem to adhere immediately to the lines and movements, colours and sounds which fall into the simple arrangements. I am not asserting that this is the earliest origin of, say, the dance. We are not speaking historically; and it is quite possible that a representative meaning in, e.g., the dance, as the war dance, the bear dance, the Dionysus dance, may be older