I

xxx

 

In the often quoted but little read study essay entitled "Beauty and Ugliness" which I published in collaboration with C.A.T. in the Contemporary Review for Oct–Nov  1897, we put forward as explanation of ˘aesthetic˘ preferences and aversions (in the field of visible form, the hypothetical probable existence in the aperception ˘all˘ & visual form aperception of a ˘gro˘ factor ˘factor˘ which I subsequently (X ˘leave space for short footnote˘) identified with partly wi mainly with the phenomenon described by

Prof. Lipps as a "ästhetische Einfühlung" ˘ästhetische Einfühlung˘ while recognising that this ˘this˘ my supposed factor in aesthetics also have considerable analogy to what Prof. Groos has called aesth "Innere Nachahung"  and, in his recent admirable paper  "ästhetisches Miterleben".

 

The comparison of my own views with those of Herrn Prof Lipps and Groos and of other, less i epochmaking aestheticians; xx added and also fourteen additional years of my own aesth observations & experiments in the field

of aesthetics, -- all this has brought ab altered brought some alteration in my views attitude on these subjects. And it is this alteration I propose to explain, merely bec not from any wish to justify myself, but because it will make such an expl the understand this this explanation may save younger students some of the confusion of thought which I have gradually cleared up for myself : the confusion, principally, between 1st the hypothesis explanation

of aesthetic preference through ˘by˘ the presence of motor a supposed ˘xxx˘ interpretation of visible shapes in terms of human dynamical experience, which is what ˘all˘ I accept of Professor Lipps Lipps’ Einfühlung. and ˘2dly/˘ the explanation of this interpretation anthropomorphic habit by a more or less localised ˘and˘ objective muscle muscular more or less externalised "imitation act of mimicry; and finally ˘3dly˘ / the explanation of the "pleasure-pain" q or rather satisf pleasure-pain (or really more correctly satisfaction= dissatisfaction) quality

and the emotional resonance of aesthetic preference and aversion aperception by a supposed participation of those great organic processes, cardiac, respiratory, equilibratory and locomotor, which the so called "Lange-James"  hypothesis invokes as the chief factors in everything which we call "mood" or "emotion".

 

These three suppositions were confused in my mind (if not in that of the collaborator who furnished me with ˘the˘ experimental and more less abstract portion of m the essay)

at the time of my collaboration in "Beauty and Ugliness". They remain confused Th They are closely connected ˘together˘; but they are independent of one another; and if I succeed in making younger students hold them asunder and study them separatly, I shall have done much for the progress of aesthetics.

I shall examine,in the first following pages, ˘I shall examine˘ in what the ˘various˘ relation of the three popositions may ultimately be found to be when addition so the analysis and especially the do personal

observation of actual aesthetic ˘subjective & objective˘ facts shall have taken the place of the dissection of mere definitions and abstractions which has hitherto engaged the engaged so-called aestheticians. I shall point out what kind of evidence is possible requisite and procurable for the acceptance of final acceptance of any of these three propositions ; and, while surmising that attempting to put a little order into the problems of a future science of  aesthetics, I shall, I trust, bring home to the student the

immense complexity, the immense (perhaps!) irreducible obscurity immense (perhaps irreducible!) obscurity of the vast intermeshed phenomena which we have all ˘each˘ of us,˘aestheticians˘ great and small ˘aestheticians˘, attempted  to explain by some tiny little hypothesis tiny tidy little "all embracing" principle of our own.

The following pages will therefore deal, in as undogmatic a manner as possible with the reasons ˘facts˘ in favour of 1°/ Lippsian Einfühlung

2°/ Innere Nachahmung

and 3°/ of the application to

aesthetics˘aesthetic phenomena˘ of the  Lange-James hypothesis.

Before proce doing this, and during the whole course of doing it, I shall, however, be employed in mak putting a little order into our all our thinking ord about the various fa sides of the aesthetic problem, and this, by insisting upon the recognition and temporary isolation of what I find it convenient to allude to call the central problem of aesthetics.

II

And in th this part of my task I can best explain myself by reference to my own my own work and to the evolution of my own ideas.

In that, as I said, often quoted but little understood essay called Beauty and Ugliness, what was least understood by our readers and not at all by our critics, was the fact of the limitation of our enquiries to this ˘such a˘ central a problem of aesthetics. We were My collaborator and I

were not investigating into the nature, the ret functions of the work of art as a whole, with its representative, evocative, dramatic, human (so to say novelist’s emotional) functions, its power of imitating, recording, suggesting objects and events belonging to the real ˘external˘world or the real human vicissitudes outside itself.

We were trying to account for the interest and powers of one factor only in the work of art’s (or n effects : the factor of mere visible form shape (or "form"); by

 the visual arts convey which the arts visual arts the im all imitation, representation, suggestion, in expression and general ˘human˘ emotional stimulation; and which ˘shape or form˘ can please and displease, fascinate or repel, entirely apart from any such imitation, representation, suggestion etc and even not unfrequently in direct contradiction thereunto.

This problem of form visible form is not the problem to which Hildebrand & his disciple Cornelius have attached that name, confusing ˘xxx˘ ˘meaning˘ as they do the adequate suggestion of by means of visible forms of properties & groups of properties not

˘really shown or˘ neccessarily visible; in other words the way to employ ˘artistic˘ form in order to suggest something beyond itself.

The problem we dealt with in Beauty and Ugliness  was, on the contrary, that of the intrinsic attractiveness satisfactoriness of visible form as such, and the pleasure (or the reverse) which we its mere contemplation can awaken.

In fact, we were dealing with the same problem which h is for con has been ˘almost˘ exclusively treated (and no where else in so masterly a manner) in Lipps’ Raum Aesthetik and those portions of his other works

in which he ˘Prof Lipps˘ is satisfied with amplifying and applying the principles s put forward in the Raum Aesthetik. And I shall call this the central problem of aesthetics because the other aesthetical problems ramify from or lead up to it, complicating and obscuring it in every way, but leaving it, whenever we can put them aside, as an essential core of all questions concerning the satisfaction and dissatisfaction produced by visible shapes independently of the probably chemico-physiological action of colour.

In pagepage 6 The second part of Beauty and Ugliness contains at page 682 of the Nov ˘1897˘ number of the Contemporary Review, the following statement & among a great number of which I select for brevity from a great number of similar ones :

"We follow lines by muscular adjustments more considerable than those of the eye and these muscular adjustments result in a sense of direction and velocity in ourselves and a consequent attribution of direction and velocity to the lines thus perceived."

I have underlined pthe second part of this sentence

because it contains the essence of the theory of Ästhetische Einfühlung as set forth in Lipps’ Raum Ästhetik, while the first part of the sentence is contains an explanation a hypothetical explanation of that "attribution of direction and velocity to the lines thus perceived". Had I If the magnificient analysis of Lipps had been known to me at the time of my collaboration in Beauty and Ugliness  [the Raumaesthetik was published in [in ˘18˘] and came to my knowledge from a quotation in Karl Groos’s Spiele der Menschen published in 189...] I it is quite I should 

not ˘indeed˘,

as Professor Lipps expects of his disciples, have abandonned the hypothesis xxxx all ˘accepted this˘ thought of explaining this attribution of direction and velocity, and, of course of ˘human˘ energy and all its moods, to lines and motionless shapes ˘as an ultimate as a psychological fact requiring no explanation˘.  But I should have recognized, as I now recognize that this phenomenon, which I brevity obliges me to all name call ˘designate˘ by Professor Lipps most misleading express x title of "Aesthetische Einfühlung" does not require for its explanation or either for the ver explan verification

or for the explanation of its existence, any such "alteration in our respiratory" "muscular adjustments" as the observations of my collaborator and, in some measure, my own int selfobservation, had led us to connect with it.

 

The phenomenon of  Einfühlung (as connected with visible lines, plas and shapes) requires can be demonstrated by such purely psychological facts as Lipps himself has accumulated, with a geniality magnificent masterliness in the analysis of the Raum Aesthetik, and cognate parts of his other works. And the phi and it

can be explained, without even Lipps’s decidedly metaphysical phraseology about projection of the ego or other mis animistic notions conceptions dra due to that misleading expression "sich Einfühlen" --by reference to merely mental phenomena. The attribution of ˘the˘ mood of our output human dynamics, of our is a psychological (or is not) a psychological fact, and is explicable by other psychological facts, real or not real.

The question is Can we find in our consciousness the material, so to speak, out of which Si "Feelings" as distinguished from "sensations" of dynamic shapes are among

direct the direct, the primary data ("données premières") of consciousness. Modern psychology (and even modern philosophy thanks to Bergson) is has prepared us to understand that aesthetic "Einfühlung"  would not be a sudden activity phenomenon starting ex nihilo, but a mere re-grouping  of senses of movement which are for ever present in our consciousness, indeed which seem to form its woof (la trame).

"Feelings" (as distinguished from "sensations") of dynamic conditions and alterations are among the direct, the primary data of our psychic life : feelings of direction, of velocity, of effort, of facility, all the notions expressed not merely by verbs, adverbs and prepositions, constitute as large a part of our consciouness as those verbs, adverbs and prepositions do of our speech.

*

(Footnote)

 

Footnote to p 20--Cf. Richard Hamann’s extraordinarily interesting "über die psychologischen Grundlagen des  Bewegungs-begriffes" in Zeitschrift für Psychologie vol 43. --"Hieraus wirdes Klar, dass wir u überall da, wo wir einem fremden Körper Bewegung und Ruhe zuschreiben, diesen Körper ans inneren Erfahrungen heraus ein gleiches Verhalten zusoschreiben. Die Beschreibung des relativen Ortsänderung eines isoherten Körpers zu einem Hintergrunde durch die Ansdrücke Bewegung und Ruhe ist ein Anthropomorphismus der als solches am stärksten bei nicht menslichen besonder

leblosen Körpern sich geltend macht. Wir tun bei der Bensteilung von Beg Bewegungen nichts anders als wenn wir Gestalt änderungen eines Gesichts als ausdrucksbewegungen interpretieren.--"

the dr direct, the first, primary data (les données premières) of consciousness; f feelings of direction, of velocity, of effort, of of facility, all the notions expressed by adverbs and prepositions, constitute as obvious large a part of our "psychic" life as those adverbs and prepositions do of life's expression in words. Indeed

 

TheyThey are always present in our "thought"; they are not words of our knowledge of our own existence ˘(*Footnote)˘. There would be nothing n It Nothing would be more natural than that, in the constant process of referring the less known to the better known, of expecting the future in terms of the present,

we should express ˘interpret˘ the relations of seen lines & shapes in the modes of our seeing them and the own ever-present activities, more particularly as those lines and shapes are themselves aperceived, apprehended, measured, compared,  and reconstructed by a a great complex processes of such activity on our own part. Moreover, as This is th would be the first act, a part of the Lippsian Einfühlung. The second would follow equally naturally, since the thought ˘qualities peculiarities˘ of our own modes of activity would not being localised ˘[Cf. Quotation from Münsterberg --Further on] in ourselves by

any actual movements with their accompanying sensations, would t tend to attach itself to the o exterior objects which had awakened the thought of them, very much as the qualities of colour are transferred from our unlocalised owing to the unlocalised nature of the sensations, from our eye to the seen objects, so that we should the qualities of swiftness, smoothness, energy, direction, etc etc, really on appertaining to our own actual experience would be attributed to the lines and shapes with whom

in the course of whose aperceptions (i.e. of a real activity of measurement, comparison & localis & reconstruction) such modes of activity would have been awakened in our consciousness. And finally --and this is the third step in a pur purely psychological analysis of Einfühlung-- these mo modes (or combinations of modes) of activity would be accompanied by the "pleasure-pain" --or not displeasure"-- alternative, and amount to an "emotion" whenever their isolation in the field of attention (by

Lipps’s "aesthetic isolation") ˘Cf. also quotation from Münsterberg later on)˘ brought all these sxx feelings of movement (movement, in movement of "attention" and movements  associated by the act of interpretation, into to play the chief part in our consciousness. We should thus This ˘Such˘ would be the purely psychological phenomenon of meant by attended to by described by Lipps as Asthetische Einfühlung, and such its explanation by purely psychological data. (foot. S).

The only thing toWe shoulThis would afford an adequate psychological explanation of the preference of certain visible shapes to certain others. And the onl sc enquiry acceptance of s such a hypothesis would depend merely upon the correct observation of the and analysis of the psychological facts of the ˘such˘ preference ˘of

certain visible shapes˘ whether it is constant & regular, for instance, up and upon the verification of the alleged presence of motor ideas of movement and their transfer from our consciouness to the objective reality which had awakened them. X Footnote S

 

Such psy purely psychological testimony to a purely psychological explanation of a

purely psychological process of "Aesthetische Einfühlung" Professor Lipps has accumulated in his the analysis of simple & complex shapes contained in his Raumaesthetik and other of his works. Other evidence on the subject would always of a purely psychological order, would consist ˘could be obtained˘, as I shall endeavour to illustrate by experiment observ experimentally by the scrutiny of the terminology ad words & expressions implying movement which ar habitually applied to motionless shapes  and objects, and of the degree of cogency which such words are admitted to possess by persons employing them.

FootNote S ˘Footnote to p 25˘

How ˘The conclusion to be completed sufficient drawn from am willing to consider This purely psychological explanation can be seen ˘are shown˘ from a˘n˘ note unpublished note written by me in April 1904 and which ˘Paragraph A˘ agrees extraordinarily with the part ˘sentence˘ marked A in my quotation from the book which Prof. Münsterberger published in 1905, and with the sentence marked A in the quotation from Prof Groos article on Miterleben published in 1909.

 

I point out the independent manner in which we have arrived at these conclusions because the coincidence ad proves a is, I think, indicative of their correctness. / (run on)

even suppresses "Individu devant l’objet d’art" given as it is from NoteBook of May April 1904 but cannot find English--

"Je suis tentée de croire que le mouvement que nous projetons dans l’oeuvre d’art est de la nature de cet acte initial suffisant à déclancher [déclencher] toute une série automatique, qui est la seule partie d consciente de tout acte habituel (A) Ce mouvement se réduit, pour ainsi dire, à la pensée de l’acte à accomplir; c’est celui qui nous permet d’en donner l’ordre à nous mêmes. C'est le "je me lève" -- "je me baisse" -- "je me mets en branle" -- C'est le "marche[".] Le trois qui précède toute action

volontaire; bref, c’est tout ce qu’il nous est donné de savoir sur des mouvements parfaitement combinés et tout le procédé musculaire localisé n’est plus présent à notre conscience.

 

Il ne peut en être autrement. Il est inconcevable que nous projetions dans des objets sans mouvement ou inanimés aurte chose que des mouvements organiques et familiers au point de faire partie intégrale de notre conception de toute existence; or ces mouvements sont absolument automatiques, réduits dans la conscience au schéma le plus amoindri, et ayant perdu tous les signes servant à les localiser

dans notre corps. Car si une partie de ce procédé p musculaire se faisait jour dans notre conscience, elle apporterait avec elle ses signes localisants (pourquoi? June 1909) nous saurions qu’il s’agit d’un mouvement logé en nous, et nous ne pourrions pas plus l’attribuer à un corps étranger que nous ne pourrions attribuer comme "caractère visible" de ce corps étranger une sensation nettement localisée dans n une partie de notre oeil.

 

(B P.) Lipps est donc dans le vrai en disant qu’il ne peut y avoir conscience de notre état musculaire dans

l’acte même de l’Einfühlung. Mais la raison en serait non pas l’impossibilité de rapporter à nous mêmes ce que nous avons projeté au dehors de nous; mais plutôt que nous ne pourrions projeter aussi, comme modalité explicative, comme façon d’être nécessaire, un mouvement peu organisé, imparfaitement automatique et portant par conséquent des signes de localisation dans notre corps (.C) Il s’ensuit que les sensations musculaires localisées qui accompagnent souvent le phénomène

esthétique de l’attribution du mouvement aux choses immobiles, surt seront nécessairement de nature secondaire; seront des réponses automatiques à l’action que nous avons projetée dans la chose vue, en d’autres mots l’imitation intérieure faisant suite à l’Einfühlung, comme l’imitation intérieure et même extérieure fait suite à la seule pensée d’une action non projetée dans un objet vu. Ainsi à la vue d’une colonne, nous aurions la sensation musculaire (et peut-être l’acte extériorisé) de nous dresser parce que cette colonne nous aura paru (ainsi que nous le dép définissons

verbalement) se dresser; mais cette colonne aurait semblé se dresser pour notre imagination parce que certains rapports de lignes reconnus en elle se traduiraient pour nous en des automatismes dynamiques dont il ne resterait dans notre conscience que le fait initial, ce que nous appelons l’idée de se dresser. L’attribution de cette idée ainsi dépourvue de signes locaux serait l’Einfühlung nous mettant en rapport de similarité vitale avec la chose vue ; les tensions musculaires aperçues en certains cas (selon moi de moindre intensité esthétique, d’une

attention plus divisée entre la chose et notre personne) seraient un phénomène d’imitation intérieure suscité par l’attribution de notre mouvement à autre chose, bref, une suite non nécessaire de l’Einfühlung".

 

I may add to this that it has occured to me that n such secondary muscular processes may be due possibly be a means of helping out insufficient a naturally insufficient attention in the same way that silent muscular performance of a melody may be, I believe, a help to deficient auditive memory, or perhaps, a means of diminishing inattention by calling on the motor centers.

(FootNote S continued)

As regards paragraphs B & C of this note, I put them forward as a mere  suggestion, the correctness of which may be proved, but quite as probably, I think, disproved, by such further observation psychological and psycho-physiological investigations as I refer to at the end of this article.

End of Footnote to p. 25.

III

But at the time  --in 1896-7-- of my collaboration in Beauty and Ugliness I had no knowledge (and my collaborator still less) of Lipps’ theory of Einfühlung. I was too much of a novice in general psychology to recognize, as I now do, that a process ˘hypothesis˘ of attribution of processes in the perceiving subject might be projected in to the perceived object (viz. a visible shape) could might have an efficient and even sufficient basis in merely "mental" data. Moreover the Lange-James theory had, for reasons which will be obvious, connected ˘offered˘ itself more close satisfactorily with the question of aesthetic pleasure as a strik for the purpose.

 

But there were other reasons,

besides ˘my˘ immaturity of psychological thought and the vogue of a striking hypothesis, which why I could not stop ˘remain˘, as Prof. Lipps has more than once (nominativement & by severe allusions) admonished me to do, at the ˘satisfied with˘ merely psychological descriptions and explanations of the phenomenon which my collaborator and myself, believed had, as I have shown, discovered for ourselves.

 

MyMy observation, of myself, ˘own observation of the central aesthetic processes i.e. form es preference˘ and the amazingly developed self observation of the xx the collaborator to whom I owed all my examples and experiments and indeed my first notions of such a factor as "Einfühlung" had convince made me ≠ aware

of the presence of other phenomena which, in some cases at least, w accompanied the aesthetic contemplation and preference of visible shapes. In I did not arrive at the idea ˘hypothesis notion˘ of a purely mental or psychic (call it what you like best !) act of Einfühlung, of at the hypothesis of the projection of mere ideas of motion movement and movement’s modalities, because it seemed to me that what I  afterwards learned to think of under that convenient and misleading name of Einfühlung, was not a purely mental process, and that at the base of aesthetic

preference there lay not mere ideas of a motor kind, but actual muscular sensations and even objective bodily movements.  

In the sentence already quoted from p. 682 of the Contemporary Review N Oct-Nov 1897, I had the "attribution of direction and velocity to the lines perceived" had been described by me as the result of "muscular adjustments more considerable than those of the eye". On a previous page (545) I wrote that "in the opinion of the authors of this paper, the subjective states indicated by the objective terms  --height, breadth, depth, by the

more complex terms round, square,symmetrical, unsymmetrical and all their kindred terms (can) be analysed into more or less distinct knowledge of various and variously localised bodily movements"-- On page 673 my collaborator wrote, speaking of the difference between the mere recognition of real objects and the aesthetic contemplation of aesthetic & artistic shapes --"We are usually satisfied with the "mere optical perception of real figures, or even the mere recognition of them by qualities which serve as labels. But when we come to works of art we demand certain senses of adjustments in our own

bodies and to obtain these we require that the fact of lifting up and pressing down, like the facts of  bulk should be strongly realised in the painted figures"-- Again p. 676 my collaborator wrote "For the movement of an arch consists in of the balance of its two half-arches, and this balance we follow by shifting our own weight from one foot to another". and p. 678 "In this way do good antiques improve our consciousness of existence by literally forcing  forcing us to more harmonious movements. But there are other ways also in which our necessity of miming by our own muscular

adjustmentsthe forms and figures which we focus etc"-- and the w art Indeed the whole of Beauty and  Ugliness is consists very considerably of the record self observations of my collaborator proving the existence, in her case at least, of ˘localised˘ sensations of movement, and even of actual objective muscular activity, in the as accompaniments of the intense contemplation of aesthetic visible shapes.

Here therefore we had got, by ˘experimental˘ self observation of my collaborator in which (as I shall later explain at length) I refused to share for fear

of auto-suggestion, and also of spontaneous c accidental observations of spontaneous (like those of the muscular sensations connected with architecture) in which I did share, --we have got to a hypothesis by which aesth  the aesthetic contemplation perception of visible shapes is dependent upon muscular not any longer upon motor images or ideas, but upon muscular adjustments, inner or outer, and upon a bodily process to which, as the above ˘last˘ quotation exemplifies, I had allowed my collaborator and myself to attach the

convenient but disastrous wo name of "miming"--

SoThus "Beauty and Ugliness" contained not merely a psychological hypothesis analogous to the one which Lipps developed under the name of Einfühlung, but also, for the greater confusion with the result of much confusion and a good deal of ridicule, a hypothesis coincident in many points with the one which my friend Prof. Karl Groos had given the name of "Innere Nachahmung".

 

OfThis hypothesis, which

I shall call, for convenience sake the "Nachahmung" or motor hypothesis, is con is detachable from ˘not necessarily˘ the "Einfühlung" or psychological hyp hypothesis ; but it presupposes the Einfühlung and attempts to explain it. The second part of these pages will attempt to shed ˘a little of˘ the light of attempted fact f fact upon this "Nachahmung"  Element as upon the ˘supposed˘ Einfühlung  process, and or rather ˘at least˘ attempt to show that both these hypotheses, Einfühlung and Nachahmung must be tested empirically ; For the moment it is im sufficient that the reader should hold

the two things "Einfühlung" and "Nachahmung" separate in his mind and thus save himself much of the confusion to which my collaborator and myself together with every other aesthetician wh dealing with "Nachahmung"  have fallen victims. The same remark applies to a third part of the subject, w wh connect usually ˘always˘ confused, somethimes directly connected with  Nachahmung and to which, using th my "Beauty and Ugliness" as Corpus Vile of this logical demonstration I shall now proceed.

The third part of the subject has been treated of by Professor Groos in his late recent masterly article (Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik ˘1909˘) at under the name of Kinaesthetic sensations "Empfindergen aus dem Körperinnen".

IV

In the very first page of Beauty and Ugliness there occurs the following sentence which, although obscurely worded, sums up what was then my position regarding the relation of form aperception and Kinaesthesia.

"Our facts and theories, if at all correct, would establish that the aesthetic phenomenon as a whole... is the function which regulates the perception of Form, and that the perception of Form, in visual cases certainly, and with reference to hearing presumably, implies an active participation of the most important

 

important organs of animal life, a constant alteration, in vital processes requiring stringent regulation for the benefit of the total organism".

These vital processes are summed up on p. 680 as in the following manner : "The greater or lesser agreeableness of artistic experiences is therefore, due to the dependence of one of our most constant and important intellectual activities, the perception of form, on two of the most constant and important of our bodily functions, respiration and equilibrium".

This is expcan bWeThis xxx This connexion between aperception of visible shape and such bodily functions (to which the cardiac one should of course be added) is explained explicable by a sentence in on p. 562 "as the breathing works in closest connection with the eye... (This) widened way of seeing is necessarily accompanied by a widened way of breathing... and the respiratory expansion inevitably produces a general sense of expanded existence" and, another with reference to the equilibratory function by a sentence on p. 567 :

 

"We are indeed always (i.e. in ordinary life, apart from

 

from aest form aperception) feel balancing ourselves more or less… and we are therefore so accustomed to this fact that as scarcely to notice it in ordinary life. But as soon as we see something else adjusting equilibrium, our own balance seems  to swing on a wider scale, and this wider balancing brings a sense of our limits being enlarged in every direction, and our life being spread over a far wider area".

The ex very numerous experimental observations

made by my collaborator, and of what constitutes whose det record constitutes a good half of the whole work, are illustrations of the various ways ˘manner˘ and combinations of manner in which the intense aperception of visible form in its elementary details and in its most complex applications (for instance in an French Gothic ˘Nation˘ Church façade, in the interior of a French gothic cathedral and in Catena’s St Jerome as compared to Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love) can

 

produce sensations testifying to such connexion between ocular perception of shape and these respiratory and equilibratory functions.

We have thusThe The essay entitled "Beauty and Ugliness" contains therefore, besides a recognition of the attribution of our own modes of movement to visible shapes (Einfühlung) and the an alledged the statement of an alledged [alleged] set of "muscular adjustment more considerable than those of the eye" resulting in "a sense

of direction and velocity in ourselves and a consequent attribution of direction and velocity to the lines themselves (p 682) thus perceived (p. 682) a in othe or in our unfortunate phrase a "miming process" an analogous to the "Innere Nachahmung" of Karl Groos, --our essay contains, connected with this latter ˘Nachahmung˘ theory and intended as explanation not only of it but of the "Ei attri "Einfühlung" theory above mentioned, a thr third hypothesis a wx to the effect that aesthetic

form sh aperception of visible shapes is agreeable or disagreeable because it involves alterations in certain the great organic functions, principally respiratory and equilibratory, which them are themselves accompanied by feelings of organic more or less well being or the contrary. In this way does the "Lange-James" theory identifying emotional emotion with xx xx alterations of our bodily condition, find its application to aesthetics.

I have analysed at some length the chief headings of this joint work of C. Anstruther-Thomson and myself because t I can in order not merely to distinguish between the various connected (but not necessarily dependent) theories of Einfühlung, Innere Nachahmung and Kinaesthetic "Lange-James participation of organic functions" which into which what Karl Groos now calls "Aesthetisches Miterleben" ought to analysed for the purposes of investigation[.] 

But this is only part of my present purpose. I Having, as I hope, put some order in the theoretic side of the question, I desire to show how examine into the evidence the nature of the facts upon which these three connected theories are founded ; and to examine what further di theoretic distinctions these facts should lead to, and finally to examine how a our into the probability of obtaining adequate so facts sufficient to reject accept or reject some or all of these hypotheses.

And here, I again find it simplest to treat my own work in the domain of psychology aesthetics as the corpus vile of my demonstration.

 

I have just remarked alluded to the three theories –the (more or less Lippsian) Einfühlung ; the (more or less Karl Groosian) Nachahmung, and the "Lange-James" theory of organic bodily emotion, as being founded upon facts. I do not mean by this that they will be proved true by facts ; I but merely that they have been suggested by the observation

which may, or may not be, confirmed or invalidated by ˘the˘ observation on a larger scale and accompanied by more rigorous analysis. The Einfühlung theory appears to have been suggested by to Prof Lipps by ex purely psychological facts united with examination of dominant artisti forms recurring in works of art. The Nachahmung and the "Lange-James" theory x aesthetic application of the Lange James theory has has evidently been suggested to Prof. Groos by his attention having been drawn to mimetic processes (actual or merely felt) and to phenomena of

what we will call "bodily resonance" which have aco accompanied aesthetic contemplation in his own case. As regards "Beauty and Ugliness"-- all these three theories (which neither my collaborator nor myself sufficiently distinguished) were suggested m partly by so far as "Einfühlung" went by my own introspection and my observation on of the vocabulary of movement and modes of movement of com universally applied to motionless shapes a motionless shap visible shapes ; and, with regard to "Nachahmung"

and "Lange-James  theory"-- to they were suggested mainly to my collaborator C. Anstruther Thomson by accidental self observation afterwards d in the course of  "Kunst-historisch" sxx and practical artistic studies ; and confirmed by in part by int observations, as distinguished from experiments, made by myself. And here it is well to repeat what ought to have been premised in writing Beauty and Ugliness, namely, that the experimental accounts refer to one with few exceptions, to one person only. For, while

encouraging my collaborator to push introspective experiment to the utmost and develop the capacity for it to the highest point of lucid self analysis, I did not brush not attempt to make such experiments myself well knowing that I ˘personally˘ should never be secure from auto-suggestion, and having remarked in myself a certain deficiency in natur spontaneous consciousness of motor and respiratory sensations, my own spontaneous accompanying (or if you prefer) epiphenomena in aesthetic matters being connected rather

with rythmic-auditive peculiarties and with cardiac symptoms (see for detail see Revue Phil).

 

The Essay Beauty and Ugliness I had en conclu ended my part of the essay on Beauty and Ugliness by an appeal to study... to seek, for ("before

 

I had ended the essay on Beauty and Ugliness by an appeal to psychologists and aestheticians to seek for whatever accompaniment of body bodily "sensations we may discover to them (pu factor of phi aesthetic and other psychological phenomena) in the dim places of our

consciousness"-- But, although copies of Beauty and Ugliness were sent to a great number of specialists, nothing eve came of this appeal except a notice by Mr Arre a rather puzzled ˘a brief but friendly˘ notice of M. Arreat in the Revue Philosophique, a quotation (to which I all subsequent notices m are probably due) in Prof Karl Groos’s Sp great "Spiele der Menschen" and a  scathing but most useful criticism by Prof Lipps in [leave blank].

 

How xxNothing daunted by this silence, I appealed once more

to the specialists who ought to have been interested in the question, and laid before the fourth psychological congress a mémoire et Questionnaire sur le rôle de l’élément moteur dans la Perception esthétique visuelle. I need scarcely sa add, for those who have experience of the treatment of aesthetics by psycholo p general psychologists, that not the very smallest notice was taken of this summing up of the problems & hypothesis discussed in Beauty and Ugliness. But although I determined to cease appealing

to psychologists and to pursue my investigations without their assistance. I reprinted the mémoire et questionnaire soumis au 4ème Congrès de Psychologie and circulated in privately among such of my acquaintances as were supposed to take pleasure in art, requesting them to  answer as many of the questions as possible. This proceeding produced a collection of 48 written answers to the questionnaire and with these I am now going to deal, premising that a few explanations about

the questionnaire. Firstly, it h was the resu result of a suspicion, which had arisen in me (as it did in Prof. Groos in a work which I did not then know) that the some of the phenomena described by my collaborator C. Anstruther Thomson in Beauty and Ugliness might be special to ph individuals belonging to what I then (though no longer) believed in as the "motor type", and that susceptibility to preference, to satisfaction and dissatisfaction connected

with the aperception of visible shapes might be due to the confined to persons belonging to such a "motor type"-- My My My questionnaire therefore attempted to ascertain the relation between the degree of aesthetic sensibility of m my subjects with certain peculiarities which I ch supposed to belonging belong to the famous "motor type"-- The questions were th grouped with this in view. The degree of aesthetic sensitiveness was tested by a single question (Question 9) "L’arrangement des divers plans d’un tableau,

la convergence ou la divergence des lignes qui s’enfoncent plus ou moins, vous donnent-ils soit un sentiment de soulagement, d’attraction et de bien-être, soit, (dans l’arrangement contraire) un malaise vague, une espèce d’oppression et de dégout [dégoût], presque de l’antipathie et du chagrin".

of which they knew themselves to be ignorant; the differenciation ought to have been obtained by asking "do you care for pictures independent of the subject represented and the technical interest, just for the pleasure of lines and ar composition"-- The majority of the questions were intended to discover whether the subject belonged to the motor type or to the purely visual one. This was tested by questions direct questions suggested by the experiments detailed in "Beauty and Ugliness" and w and which I sup and learning upon the part nature

the subject’s habits of remembering scenery and persons (whether en pose or in motion) his habits of looking standing still or moving in presence ˘connexion˘ of real landscapes and of free standing statues and the interior of movements, and in a by by his considering (or not) words and metaphors attributing movement to visible motionless objects and forms as "literal" or "conventional" forms of expression ; and finally by asking whether he was conscious of  states of motor tension independent of real objective movement.

With this intention the questions were grouped together in such a manner calculated to connect them for my purposes, but also, as I xx soon found, to confuse them most almost inevitably in the minds of the persons interrogated. To at these essential mistakes, due to inexperience and thoughtlessness and rendering my Questionnaire most very practically ineffectual, must be added that having been originally intented for the psychologists of the 4th Congress (who naturally paid no attention to

it, its text was bristling with technical expressions cal and began with a question calculated to frighten off laymen, n the xx almost (as I now think) unanswerrable question "Avez-vous des indices qui vous rattachent à vos propres yeux au type visuel ou au type moteur" ?

I have gone into detail about the badness of this Questionnaire, because this badness may account, in part, for its partial failure, and give have hope for better success w if an inquiry were better conducted. But the failure was only partial. Despite much

confusion and more sc refusal to answer, certain facts did come out, and facts which shed some light, I think, upon the three problems ˘hypotheses˘ of  Einfühlung, Nachahmung and application of the Lange James theory, and upon this relation with one another.

It is for this reason that I shall place before the Readers of the Zeitschift für Esthetik the results of an analysis ˘or scrutiny (dépouillement)˘ which I have now made of the  x answers to my Questionnaire sur le rôle de l’Elément Moteur dans la Perception esthétique Visuelle.

This dépoui analysis of ˘the answers to˘my Questionnaire has been made after nine years, and when my views respecting the problems of aesthetics and their formulation and relation have been changed not only by atten additional knowledge of general psychology and by the illuminating study especially of the work of Lipps and of my friend Karl Groos and of Prof. Münsterberger, but also by constant reg noted down observations of psychological

conditions sponteanously accompanying and (as distinguished from being, like C. Anstruther Thomson’s, obtained by deliberate experimental introspection) my the such constant coming in presence with works of art as is constant in h & habitual in the life of a person living in the midst of galleries and monuments (Florence – Rome – Venice – Paris – London) and whose chiefly known to the general public as a writer on art.

Miss Paget’s MS

p 46 ˘66˘ to 155

2d packet

AdditionalSuch additional study has not only convinced me, not only of the existence of a ˘theoretic˘ separation between the hypothesis of Einfühlung and those of Nachahmung and application of the Lange James theory, but has, independently of the answers to my Questionnaire, of which to which I shall soon return, it has placed before me the several extremely suggestive facts.

 

The first is that as regards myself, there is evidence of the attribution of modes of movements, energy and vitality to lines and shapes, wi and to the extent of

occasional approach alm to something x such "delusions" as thinking that the moon is moving and the clouds stationary, or that a mountain ˘that a mountain˘ rises up as we approach go towards it rapidly in a boat, a motorcar or on a bicycle (a delusion already poetically described by Wordsworth and  admirally studied by Richard Hamann in (leave blank). ˘(Footnote +) I find myself in absolute agreement with my coll former collaborator C. Anstruther Thomson in ascribing to mere arrangements of lines and planes, to mere

Foot note to page 68.

As aI will illustrate what I mean by the following entry in my diary for ˘April 29. 1904˘ April 24th 1904

"Walking about in Baptistry in state of extreme aesthetic non-receptivity. My eye caught that swirl pattern ˘on the floor˘ was immensely surprised that from a distance it took the appearance of a double trefoil. I approached. While approaching & while I stood still the pattern seemed to move very positively & violently-- to dap up and down, swirl & bend, as I remember water does. I say I remember because it’s possible that by comparison with real water this would have been motionless --or the contrary ? But the movement seemed totally objective; I could trace no movement of my eye or attention. No work of art has ever given me such

a positive sense of movement. I was not inclined to be interested,  quite the reverse, and everything else seemed as dead as a doornail. I had been waiting in t at the station nearly an hour, noticing, undergoing the  faces & manners & movement of the people with disagreable vivacity. I did not notice about a tune. I Dreams afterwards not very receptive.

 

Baptistry

 forms two dimensional or three dimensional ˘"forms"˘, hu of actions like rising up, lifting, pressing down, expanding, going in, bulging out, balancing, lifting and all the other actions us employed in the descriptive parts of Beauty and Ugliness. But I also recognize that in my own case the attribution of such qualities of movement is com so complete that it would occur to me that they it would no more occur to me that the movements were

in my mind than it would occur to me, except as a result of scientific teaching, that what I call colour is a phenomenon taking place in my eye and nerves, or that what I call a musical tone is, similarly, not in the vibrating body or the air but in my own organs of perception. In other words these qualities are, in my case, thought of and perceived as really existing in the external shape of or object, however much

my reason tells me that a motionless object or a mere two or three dimensional form, cannot be performing any of the actions which I attribute to it ; In fact in fact I seem [to] distinguish between two kinds of movement in the obje. which are outside of myself : the movement of things which are moving in the in space, occupying different parts of space and presenting different portions of themselves to my eye; and the movement of things which are not moving in space and which do not present different

parts of themselves to my eye. But to ˘in˘ my individual consciousness, these two different kinds of movement are equally independent of any participation of my ego : I follow them because they are outside me. And here I must here, while taking an this opportunity of protesting against Prof. Lipps formula of projection of the ego as distinguished from attribution of states of the ego, I must point out a slovenliness of thought of which

C. Anstruther Thomson and myself were guilty at the time of writing Beauty and Ugliness, and of which even so acute a critic as Karl Groos in not entirely free. Throughout Beauty and Ugliness we talked of "following lines" ; ˘we also talked˘ of miming or following the balance, of the movement of an arch, of "perception of the grip of the ground by a façade's base ˘base˘" -- and of "downward pressure of the mouldings and cornices" of the of "involuntary imitation of the legs of the chair pressing hard on the ground"-- when in

reality a mere visible form cannot press downwards, cannot grip, cannot balance except in ou imagin  in so far as we imagine them to do so, nor can lines move except because we attribute to them the movement by which we, as we expect it, follow them, whereas there is nothing to follow since there is nothing moving. In fact we were guilty of explaining a movement or action on our own part as "miming", that is as called into being, by a previously existing "movement" which

we had previously (and correctly, I think) explained as being attributed to motionless form because it accompanied that form’s aperception. I shall have to return later to this logical oversight, because it in connexion with the theory (and the facts) of "Innere Nachahmung"--

 

What I wish to insist upon at this moment is simply that examination of my own conscious aesthetic experience has shown me that, there is whatever activities of following, or miming, or liking or

disliking certain three two or three dimensional forms ˘shapes˘ tak may take place in myself, there is always a primary fact of certain forms ˘shapes˘ possessing movement and modalities of movement absolut as something entirely objective in the sense of thought  of without reference to myself. The shapes are gripping, balancing The shapes, as I correctly stated it in p. 568 of Beauty and Ugliness, "seem to balance and move", and I am not in the least aware of this seeming being dependent upon any thought or act of my own ; my

thoughts and acts come in secondarily, and as a seeming result, often a very different result, of the "seeming" balancing, moving or other proceedings of the lines and shapes.

ThisMy personal experience here confirms the belief in Einfühlung as a purely "mental" phenomenon, requiring no bodily "sensations" no definitely or vaguely  "localised"  "feelings of activity." And it seems to me that the very wording of many of my collaborator’s experiments takes for granted

an unlocalised, a wholly unperceived act of "Einfühlung" preliminary to the muscular localised phenomena and other objective movements by which the movement attribution is explained in those experiments.

Now let us turn to my Questionnaire sur l’Elément moteur and see whether the answers to it can throw any light upon the question about which I have just been  consulting my own experience, namely does "Does such a process as Einfühlung really exist" ? Do many ˘most˘ persons or many or any, except professional aestheticians, habitually attribute modes of their own movement and life to motionless and

inanimate shapes ? This can be To the question examined by considering current modes of speech. Forty five persons, of whom I was one, were asked whether they could attach any kind of literal meaning to such expressions as "lignes qui s’élancent, toit qui s’abaisse, groupes qui s’équilibrent" or whe other verbs of movement applied to motionless objects" or whether they considered these expressions as purely conventional and without intrinsic truth. Of these forty five persons fourteen gave no answer, nine answered no, while twenty

two, that is to say only one less than the to half, answered yes. Considering that the acc abstention from all answer whether accidental or purpos intentional, cannot be counted to the nos, it seems to me that we may conclude that at least half of the subjects interrogated presented case of Einfühlung pure and simple.

 

Ball

Int

                                       V

 

I will begin

The most int important and evidence obtained by my questionnaire is on the subject of what Prof. Groos has accustomed us to think of as "Innere Nachahmung" meaning thereby an accompaniment ˘sensations of states˘ muscular sensations strain, more or less localised, which accompany or emphasize the aesthetic phenomenon, and which vary from vague faint & only vaguely localised sensations to actual beginnings of imitative movements which are somethimes act carried out ; muscular states

in confirmation of whose existence Prof. Groos has more than once done my collaborator and myself the honour of quoting from our print work on Beauty and Ugliness.

It is, I repeat, upon this subject that the answers to my Questionnaire are the most important and instructive. They are so, strange as it may at first appear, exactly because they are utterly contradictory to one another and even contradictory in themselves. On the qu questions referring to imitation, neg of to such phenomena (11e quest.

out of 45 persons interrogated thirty thirty nine have answers. But of these 39 answers by n only a small proportion can be ru put under a distinct rubric of yes or no.  Ten answer not at all. Only two answer yes or certainly. Twenty seven answer with with provisos and distinguos which constitute apparent contradictions somethimes constitute apparent contradictions. Six refer limit the imitation imitative impulse

to remembering or describing (A "when memory is lively" -- B "rather when thought of"-- C "in describing"-- D "in recalling only"-- E "as result of thinking about it" etc)

Another group of five answers (of which myself) discriminates speaks of dramatic imitation or imitation of the human action of a work of art (A ˘F˘ "only or especially if the attitude represented is forced," B ˘G˘ "only in the case of inferior or badly restored statues C ˘H˘ "if a picture is lifelike, but engagement is greatest when body is at rest"--

˘D˘ Two ˘(not myself)˘ discriminating still further saying (A˘I˘) that outer imitation distracts the attention and (˘J˘ B) that imitation brings home the "human quality of a represented gesture" but that this "does not affect the aesthetic appreciation".

We now come to another group of answers to which I wish to draw particular attention. I will put their these answers in a crescendo of suggestiveness. ˘K˘ A speaks of slight indication with the body of the pose of a statue"-- This is ambiguous

but B ˘L˘ leaves no doubt that there is he means Nachahmung not necessarily of a dramatic sort, "speaking of impulses to imitate "braced or languid attitude"-- This distinction between Nachahmung of a dramatic and of an aesthetic kind of the action represented (dramatic Na mimicry) and Nachahmung of a to connected with mere shape becomes accentuated in our series. ˘M˘ C speaks of "tending to draw the work of art in imagination".

D˘N˘ thinks that "a beginning

of muscular imitation must be connected with lines"-- E ˘O˘ has only very slight unlocalisable "feelings of direction" and these are connected with lines and planes.

FF speaks ˘and G P and Q speak˘ of mere "inner tensions" and "innervations" and G ˘Q˘ adds but "outer imitation disturbs aesthetic pleasure".

This s groThe tendency ˘significance˘ of this group of answers is made clearer by details in other answers.

˘R˘ A says that there is no imitation in connexion with statues or works of art;

is affirmed very distinctly by R, S, T and V ; and W, X, Y and Z a declare bodily quiescence "ease" (that is no attempt at assuming the position of a statue) as most favourable to aesthetic engagement ; while yet another subject remarks that aesthetic engagement is accompanied by forgetfulness of one’s own body.

WhoThe groups in which I have placed these answers are intended to suggest my own explanation of the

of the contradictions, discriminations, contradictions and incoherences contained in them.

 

My own diary gallery diary (of which extracts were given in Rev. Philosophique "l’Individu devant l’oeuvre d’art"-- during ten years succeeding the publication of Beauty of and Ugliness has made this meaning clear ˘cle clear˘ to me. This diary (for large extracts of which I refer to my essay : L’individu devant l’œuvre d’art – Revue Phil. 1905, 1, 2) em give in overwhelming proofs that, when in dealing

with "Innere Nachahmung"-- (and er Prof Groos, and we are dealing with two different phenomena, often somethimes connected and intermeshed but frequently in violent contradiction, but which other aestheticians (Prof. Groos, Mr Berenson and even Prof. Lipps in part of those parts of his Aesthetik where he when he passes beyond the limits of his "Raum-aesthetik) have s usually mixed up together, and which some of the vocabulary of "Beauty and Ugliness"

was not co calculated to discriminate  as it ought to have done ˘clearly˘. For the entries in my diary show that, as I myself answered to the questionnaire, it is 1° only statues and pictures which are lacking definiteness and harmony of lines owing to their being in by inferior artists or to having been st badly restored distor badly restored, which provoke in my own case any vivid realisation, such as might provoke incipient imitation of the action which they are

intended to convey and 2do that it is only on days when aesthetic atten engagement is difficult and the attention easily diverted to by the presence of real people, that such realisation of the represented action becomes dominant and to the amount of an obsession.

The attention explanation of this curious fact, verified in my own case during several years and verified also by my pupil Dr Maria Krebs-Waser, is, I think as follows.

con agrees with the testimony of the questionnaire answers and explains the apparent contradiction the of some persons speaking of non-imitation positions being the most propitious to w artistic engagement, others expressly stating that imitative tensions ˘sensations˘ are called forth only in response to works of art being lifelike, nay that imitative ˘sensations˘ are called forth mostly in remembering or describing, nay that imitative sensations have no favourable do not favour aesthetic enjoyment,

and finally that, as one of the interrogated persons puts it, aesthetic engagement makes one forget one’s own body.

While, Professor Groos appears to have noticed something of this kind, only that he explains on the other hand, a group of answers inform us that there are "beginnings of muscular imitation connected with planes", "feelings of direction connected with lines"--, "inner statements which may be further illustrated by the answer the statement of one of the

that one of the subjects "tends to draw in imagination the work of art before him"--

 

Now it is with thisThis following muscular These muscular sensations provoked by the sight of the lines & planes, the mere shapes contained in or constituing a work of art, are of a different nature from the muscular sensations provoked by the realisation of a gesture or action which those lines & planes, those mere shapes

suggest to our mind, that is to say, to our stored up experience. And they are, though somethimes connected, on the whole opposed to one another ; For an action or gesture is a series requires a s change or a series of changes of visible shape (as is proved by the cinematograph) and the thought, the realisation in ourselves through muscular sensations, of such a alterations of shape must necessarily disturb the divert the attention from the thorough contemplation

of the unchanging relations of lines & planes constituting a definite visible shape. We may indeed (and often do) think in rapid alternation, of the aspect which a picture or statue presents and of the aspects which would be presented by if the action or gesture suggested were carried out, but the one process cannot be dwelt upon without checking the other. Thus, if we re think of the horse of Marcus Aurelius as really walking, if we

think (and still more, bodily feel) the next positions of the horse’s legs and the rider’s hand arm, we are diverted from the full realisation of the interplay of lines formed by the and planes constituting the shape of the horse & rider as they are ; and vice versa, if we are absorbed in following (I use the verb purposely, meaning thereby that our attention takes time to pass from point to point) this interplay of lines & planes, then the

realisation of what action is intended to the suggested, what or in other words the imaginary going on to the next moments of that action, is by in so far impeded. I have given in the Rev. Phil. numerous extracts from my gallery diaries, showing how recording 1° my ˘frequent˘ difficulty  in ( in deciding whether a good antique is walking or standing still (if compare Taine’s remark that an antique does nothing, but merely exists beautifully) 2do the annoya amazing

emphasis or suddenness of the gesture of painted or sculptured figures whose lines do not combine into a sufficiently unified pattern (whence the so that we [I] get a disagreeable feeling-- "There he is still at that ! Why does’nt [doesn’t] he do something else" due to my attention motor imagination being first excited by and then frustrated. (compare the common belief, formulated by Lessing, that xx painting and sculpture should not take sudden, transient

or violent movements for a this subject, a view contradicted by the Laocoon itself, which represents movement bot as sudden, transient and violent as one can choose, but does so in a particularly elaborate pattern which the forces the attention to dwell and upon and return to the same points, thus producing a very restful aesthetic impression).

I have insisted at great length upon this difference between ˘the˘ motor con ideas (Lipps) (Einfühlung) and muscular tensions (Innere Nachahmung) provoked by

the 1°/ the suggestion of change, of locomoti locomotion or change of position inherent to all objective movement in represented things and 2do the suggestion of dynamic ˘motor˘, cond of dynamic conditions accompanying the aperception of motionless shapes and due to our attention moving across them in the acts of measurement & comparison and to our tendency to att attribute to what we see in the modes of our unlocalised activity of seeing. In other words I have insisted on the difference between (which

the answer to my questionnaire as well as my personal experience reveal) between dramatic mimicry and that process which was most unluckily called mimicry of shape and pattern in the essay on Beauty and Ugliness ; and I have done so, first because this latter is the only sort of Nach Innere Nachahmung implied ˘referred to˘ in that essay, and also because the failure to see the difference between the two processes has not only prevented diverted aestheticians from the central problem of aesthetics, namely

the problem why some shapes (independent of what they represent) are liked & called beautiful & other shapes disliked & called ugly ; but has also contributed to confuse this central aesthetic problem with the subsidiary problem how shapes can be made most representative and ˘or˘ suggestive of xxx being things or actions extrinsic to themselves, and thus led speculation to erroneous explanation of the vitalising or "life-enhancing" powers of artistic form. I shall illustrate this confusion by reference

to the writings of Mr B. Berenson, because choosing them rather than others, not merely because, besides possessing aesthetic experience and acumen incomparable, superior to that of nearly every writer on the subject and hence speaking with far greater authority than even the most distinguished psychologists, Mr Berenson’s is one of the works are among the contain some of the earliest, most original and therefore independent and therefore genuine and important testimony to the existence of motor processes a in connexion with aesthetic

phenomena ; his "Florentine Painters" in which he first put forward his t his theory of what = he calls "Tactile values" having them published written most certainly without knowledge of my own essay, which [was] also written without knowledge of his theories, on Beauty and Ugliness, and also, to all appearance, without knowledge of the id si cognate ideas of Mssrs Lipps and Groos. Indeed, I am have chosen in Mr Berenson’s work as the an illustration of the pratically universal

confusion between the two kinds of Innere Nachahmung (and indeed of E Lippsian Einfühlung also) because it enables me to add, without further interrupting my exposition, Mr Berenson’s extremely valuable authoring to whatever testimony mo the other evidence ˘first hand˘ (that xxx of Lipps, Groos, C. Anstruther Thomson & myself and the subject of my Questionnaire) to the existence either of Einfülhung or of Innere Nachahmung.*

         ___________________________________

* Add. Other authorities : Wölfflin, Müller-Freienfels, Münsterberg, Lalo.

Leave space

I must premise, be that in the following quotations the word  tactile ˘sense˘ appears to be used employed with the meaning of muscular sense, and, even occasionally, as in connexion with realisation of the third dimension, with the meaning of sense of locomotion of the whole or part of the body.

 

Tuscan Paintersp 9.

"The stimulation of our tactile imagination awakens our consciousness of the importance of the tactile sense in our physical and mental functioning, and thus again, by making us feel better provided for life than we are aware of being, gives us a heightened

sense of capacity".

 

p 14. Our eyes h scarcely have had time to light on it (a madonna by Giotto) before we realise it completely, the throne occupying a real space, the virgin satisfactorily seated upon it etc… Our tactile imagination is put to play immediately; our palms and fingers accompanying our eyes more quickly than in presence of real objects, the sensations varying constantly with the various projections represented as of face, torso, knees etc.

 

p. 9. I never see them (Masaccio’s paintings) without the strongest stimulation of my tactile consciousness.

I feel that I could touch every figure, that it would yield to a definite resistance. that I should have to expend thus much effort to displace it, that I could walk around it".

 

p 35. The essential in painting … is the rendering of tactile values (see above for definition of these, including the suggestion of walking round and pushing aw away, that is to say suggestions of locomotion and of muscular effort, such as "fingers and palms" sensations cannot represent except symbolically) of the forms represented, because by this means, and this

onlyalone, can art make us realise forms better than we do in life".

p. 84. We realise objects when we perfectly translate them into terms of our own states, of our own feelings … because we keenly realise the movement of a railway .. speak of it as going or running, instead of rolling on its wheels… The more we endow it (an object) with human attributes, the less we merely know, the more we realise it, the more does it approach the work of art".

 

p 86. (Cf. Wölfflin) For here, speaking of Michelangelo ˘the nude˘ "For

here alone can we watch those tautnesses of muscles and those stretchings and relaxings and ripplings of skin which translated into similar  strains in our own persons, make us fully realise movement".

p. 69 et seq… Those who care Those who of us who care for nothing in the work of art but what it represents are either powerfully attracted or repelled by his (Botticelli’s) unhackneyed types and quivering feeling ; but if we are such as have an imagination of touch and movement that is

easily˘easy to˘ stimulated, we feel in Botticelli a pleasure that few, if any, other artists can give us… Imagine shapes (of hair) having the supreme life of line, you may see in the contours of licking flames." and yet Ibid take the lines that render the movement of the tossing hair, the fluttering draperies and the dancing waves … take these lines alone with all their power of stimulating our imagination of movement, and what do we have ? Pure values of movement abstracted unconnected with any

representation whatever … Imagine an art made up entirely of these quintessences of movement values … Tactile w values were translated (in Botticelli) into values of movement and, for the same reason and to prevent the drawing of the eye inward, to prevent it and to devote itself to the rythm [rhythm] of the line, the  backgrounds were either entirely suppressed etc.

In these quotations it seems to me that there are allusions to two wholly different

things, namely 1° to visible shapes which suggest objective movements of the represented objects and f moi 2do to visible shapes which are made up of in the and call forth sensati in the spectator feelings or "sensations" of strain connected with such as he would have if he made those movements himself ; and 2do visible shapes made up of lines and combinations of line which awaken in the spectator feelings of  "movement abstracted, unconnected with any representation whatever"  & movement to which, in the

next sentence, we are tol Mr Berenson attributes the formal, the aesthetic quality of rhythm of lines the line. Nay ; the abstract, qual non-representative quality of this movement (which dexxxx produces rhythm of the line) is made further made ≠ more unequivocal by the remark that for better dive in order to enable us to devote ourselves to the rhythm of the line the backgrounds were (either) entirely suppressed, that is to say that the imagination of movement of the represented thing in real

space was refused a great part of the third dimension without which the movement of real, i.e. represented objects, and their cannot be thoroughly realised. This passing ˘transition˘ from 1° the interest in represented or suggested movement (i.e. of movement implying body and change in that body’s aspect) to 2do interest in the movement (including of course rythm [rhythm]) attributed by us to motionless and bodiless shapes lines and shapes, is dissimu hidden under the expression "translating tactile values into values of movements".

I will add one more quotation which, while constituting an additonal repetition of so great aexperienced anso experienced an aesthetician’s testimony to in favour of Innere N motor processes and Innere Nachahmung, will serve to show how this comparison between the s motor accompaniments of form sh form ˘aesthetic˘ form aperception and the motor accompaniments of the mimetic sympathy with represen the actions of represented thin beings has forced Mr Berenson into explaining aesthetic pleasure as due to eas easy, facilitated suggesti thought

about qualities which are xxx  circumstances connected with the represented object as distinguished from the visible form in whi by which it is it is represented (or suggested) and has thus led him to overlook or evade what I call the central aesthetic problem, viz., the problem of the preference and antipathy inspired by visible shapes ap entirely apart from any object or action which they may (and in the case of pure ˘decorative˘ pattern & of architecture) or

may not suggest ; the problem dealt with in Lipps’ Raum-aesthetik, and to which he has applied the hypothesis of Einfühlung.

"I see" writes Mr B (Tuscan Painters p. 50) … two men wrestling ; but unless my retinal impressions are immediately translated into images of strain and pressure in my muscles, of resistance to my weight of touch all over my body, it means nothing to me in terms of vivid experience.. although a wrestling match may in fact, contain

many genuinely artistic elements(?) our engagement of it can never be quite artistic ; we are prevented from completely realising it not only by the dramatic interest in the game, but also by the succession of movements being too rapid for us to realise each completely, and too fatiguing, if realisable. Now if a way could be formed of conveying to us the realisation of movement without the confusion and the fatigue of the actuality, we should be getting out of the wrestlers more than they themselves can give us, the heightening of vitality

which comes to us whenever we keenly realise life such as it the actuality would give us, plus the greater effectiveness of the heightening brought about by the clearer, intenser and less fatiguing realisation. This is precisely what the artist who succeeded in representing movements achieves ; making as realise it as we never can actually, he gives us a heightened sense of capacity … In words already familiar, he extracts the significance of movement, just as, in

rendering tactile values, the artist extracts the corporeal significance of objects. ... NThe What a pleasure to be able to realise in my own muscles, in my own chest, with my own arms & legs the life that is in him as he is making his supreme effort, et … how after the contest his muscles will relax and rest trickle a like a refreshing stream through his nerves".

 

The fMr Berenson here ascribes ascribes our pleasure to the to a facilitated realisation. In the same

way that Hildebrand and his follower Cornelius identify beauty of form with the easy and satisfactory suggestion of corporeal qualities and sp locomotor possibilities of object represented (what Mr B. calls "extracting the corporal significance") so Mr Berenson here explains our pleasure in an arrangement of visible shapes (Phaisto’s Herakles and Antaeus) by the increased facility with which our attention wanders off from those visible shapes to the

realisation of a dramatic action and of successive moments (even the rest after the contest !) which must present totally different visible shapes to our aperception, much as if we identified the pleasure afforded by a picture with its being the starting point for a cinematographical performance.

 

I hope by this time to have distinguished, as even so acute a critic as Prof. Groos has failed

between such dramatic mimicry as this and those incipient or actualised movements to which my collaborator and myself referred whenever throughout Beauty and Ugliness, we applied the fatally misleading word miming to the "lifting up" and "pressing down" ; the "gripping of the ground", the "balancing" of symmetrical sides of the mere shapes of pottery, furniture, architecture and the accepted from common usage scarcely less misleading word following as applied to the "movements of lines" in pictures. The distinction appears to have

The difference is difficult to keep steadily before one, as is shown by even so acute an analyst as Prof. Groos, and I am afraid that at the time of writing Beauty and Ugliness there was an occasional confusion even in my mind on the subject of the "miming of the gesture" of a statue, in consequence of the experiments of my collaborator having shown that "we cannot satisfactorily focus a stooping figure like the Medicean Venus if we stand before it bolt upright and with tense muscles, nor a very

erect & braced figure like the Apoxyomnios if we stand before it humped up and with slackened muscles. Wishing to clear up this definitively, I have, previous to beginning this article, asked my collaborator C. Anstruther Thomson The observations on myself contained in my Gallery diary have convinced me (as I have already mentioned here & published in the Rev. Phil) that the realisation, whether or not accompanied by bodily tension, of the human action or gesture of the human being

erectrepresented in a work of art, is in inverse ratio to the realisation, accompanied or not by si bodily tension, of the movements attributed to the lines and shapes of that work of art, and that the and that the what I sh must call the translation ( of the visible shapes into terms of f human locomotion, gesticulation or such successive proceedings as produce (compare the cinematograph, a succession of different visible aspects) is in my case frequent only when when there is (from artistic

inferiority[,] mutilation or insufficiency or mistaken restoration on antiques) a lack of defined and unified "movement of lines", or else before I have had time to be absorbed in such a scheme of and quality of line movement, and am still busy with the initial question which occurs in every ˘new˘ act of visual aperception : what is this the thing of which I now see the shape ? Or what ˘thing˘ does this shape represent, ˘or˘ suggest or res by resemblance ?

It will be  remembered that some of the answers ˘to˘ of my questionnaire spoke tendencies to put assume a tense or slack

attitude according as the "pose" of the statue was te braced or slack, and apart from any tendency to mimic its represented action. This observation has been confirmed to me by one of the in confirmation by one of the most inter important writers on the laws of sculpture. And it is to such conformity of our own bodily tensions with (whether ˘definetely˘ localised or not) with the dynamic suggestions of a statue’s shape, that my collaborator and myself now wish to i now limit the  remark (Beauty and

Ugliness p. 677) concerning "When we adjust our muscles in imitation of the tenseness or slackness of the statue’s attitude, the statue becomes a reality to us"--

In order to remove any ambiguity working in this these words, I have or suggested by the perhaps defective wording of "Beauty and Ugliness"-- I have obtained from my collaborator C. Anstruther Thomson a summing up of the experimental observations self observation made by her previous to and subsequent to the writing of our print essay. The and put in the shape of questions to others.

              QUESTIONS BY C. ANSTRUTHER THOMSON

1. When you look at a good work of Art, do you merely see it with your eyes & your mind ? Or are you conscious, after you have looked at it for a few moments, of a wish to take it in by following its its shape by adjustments of your body ?

2. If the latter, what adjustments of your body are you conscious of making ?

3. If you sit down to look at a work of Art do you find that you see it less satisfactorily than when you stand up ?

4. If you prefer to stand up to look at the statue or monument are you conscious of shifting your weight from one foot to the other while you look at the thing ? Or do you stand firmly planted on both feet all the time ?

5. Inside any of the great ancient churches and cathedrals do you feel the ground as firmly under your feet as you felt it outside?

6. Do you find any difference between your way of breathing inside the church and outside it?

5. Do you feel the movements of an antique statue as human movement that you want to copy in your own body or as some other sort of movement ?

6. If the latter what sort of movement ?

(text) Questions by C. Anstruther Thomson

1. When you look at a good work of Art do you merely see it with your eye & your mind? or are you conscious, after you have looked at it for a few moments, of a wish to take it in by following its its shape by adjustments of your body?

2

If the latter, what adjustments of your body are you conscious of making?

7 5

Do you feel the movements of an antique statue as human movement that you want to copy in your own body or as some other sort of movement?

If the latter what sort of movement?