PERCEPTION OF RELATIONS
WHY should this be the case? Briefly, because colours (and sounds) as such are forced upon us by external stimulation of our organs of sight and hearing, neither more nor less than various temperatures, textures, tastes and smells are forced upon us from without through the nervous and cerebral mechanism connected with our skin, muscle, palate and nose. Whereas shapes instead of being thus nilly willy seen or heard, are, at least until we know them, looked at or listened to, that is to say taken in or grasped, by mental and bodily activities which meet, but may also refuse to meet, those sense stimulations. Moreover, because these mental and bodily activities, being our own, can be rehearsed in what we call our memory without the repetition of the sensory stimulations which originally started them, and even in the presence of different ones.
In terms of mental science, colour and sound, like temperature, texture, taste and smell, are sensations; while shape is, in the most complete sense, a perception. This distinction between sensation and perception is a technicality of psychology; but upon it rests the whole question why shapes can be contemplated and afford the satisfaction connected with the word beautiful, while colours and sounds, except as grouped or groupable into shapes, cannot. Moreover this distinction will prepare us for understanding the main fact of all psychological aesthetics: namely that the satisfaction or the dissatisfaction which we get from shapes is satisfaction or dissatisfaction in what are, directly or indirectly, activities of our own.
Etymologically and literally, perception means the act of grasping or taking in, and also the result of that action. But when we thus perceive a shape, what is it precisely that we grasp or take in? At first it might seem to be the sensations in which that form is embodied. But a moment's reflection will show that this cannot be the case, since the sensations are furnished us simply without our performing any act of perception, thrust on us from outside, and, unless our sensory apparatus and its correlated brain centre were out of order, received by us passively, nilly willy, the Man on the Hill being invaded by the sense of that blue, that lilac and that russet exactly as he might have been invaded by the smell of the hay in the fields below. No: what we grasp or take in thus actively are not the sensations themselves, but the relations between these sensations, and it is of these relations, more truly than of the sensations themselves, that a shape is, in the most literal sense, made up. And it is this making up of shapes, this grasping or taking in of their constituent relations, which is an active process on our part, and one which we can either perform or not perform. When, instead of merely seeing a colour, we look at a shape, our eye ceases to be merely passive to the action of the various light-waves, and becomes active, and active in a more or less complicated way; turning its differently sensitive portions to meet or avoid the stimulus, adjusting its focus like that of an opera glass, and like an opera glass, turning it to the right or left, higher or lower.
Moreover, except in dealing with very small surfaces, our eye moves about in our head and moves our head, and sometimes our whole body, along with it. An analogous active process undoubtedly distinguishes listening from mere hearing; and although psycho-physiology seems still at a loss for the precise adjustments of the inner ear corresponding to the minute adjustments of the eye, it is generally recognised that auditive attention is accompanied by adjustments of the vocal parts, or preparations for such adjustments, which account for the impression of following a sequence of notes as we follow the appearance of colours and light, but as we do not follow, in the sense of connecting by our activity, consecutive sensations of taste or smell. Besides such obvious or presumable bodily activities requisite for looking and listening as distinguished from mere seeing and hearing, there is moreover in all perception of shape, as in all grasping of meaning, a mental activity involving what are called attention and memory. A primer of aesthetics is no place for expounding any of the various psychological definitions of either of these, let us call them, faculties. Besides I should prefer that these pages deal only with such mental facts as can be found in the Reader's everyday (however unnoticed) experience, instead of requiring for their detection the artificial conditions of specialised introspection or laboratory experiment. So I shall give to those much fought over words attention and memory merely the rough and ready meaning with which we are familiar in everyday language, and only beg the Reader to notice that, whatever psychologists may eventually prove or disprove attention and memory to be, these two, let us unscientifically call them faculties, are what chiefly distinguishes perception from sensation. For instance, in grasping or taking stock of a visible or an audible shape we are doing something with our attention, or our attention is doing something in us: a travelling about, a returning to starting points, a summing up. And a travelling about not merely between what is given simultaneously in the present, but, even more, between what has been given in an immediately proximate past, and what we expect to be given in an immediately proximate future; both of which, the past which is put behind us as past, and the past which is projected forwards as future, necessitate the activity of memory. There is an adjustment of our feelings as well as our muscles not merely to the present sensation, but to the future one, and a buzz of continuing adjustment to the past. There is a holding over and a holding on, a reacting backwards and forwards of our attention, and quite a little drama of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment, or as psychologists call them, of tensions and relaxations. And this little drama involved in all looking or listening, particularly in all taking stock of visible or audible (and I may add intellectual or verbal) shape, has its appropriate accompaniment of emotional changes: the ease or difficulty of understanding producing feelings of victory or defeat which we shall deal with later. And although the various perceptive activities remain unnoticed in themselves (so long as easy and uninterrupted), we become aware of a lapse, a gap, whenever our mind's eye (if not our bodily one!) neglects to sweep from side to side of a geometrical figure, or from centre to circumference, or again whenever our mind's ear omits following from some particular note to another, just as when we fall asleep for a second during a lecture or sermon: we have, in common parlance, missed the hang of some detail or passage. What we have missed, in that lapse of attention, is a relation, the length and direction of a line, or the span of a musical interval, or, in the case of words, the references of noun and verb, the co-ordination of tenses of a verb. And it is such relations, more or less intricate and hierarchic, which transform what would otherwise be meaningless juxtapositions or sequences of sensations into the significant entities which can be remembered and recognised even when their constituent sensations are completely altered, namely shapes. To our previous formula that beautiful denotes satisfaction in contemplating an aspect, we can now add that an aspect consists of sensations grouped together into relations by our active, our remembering and foreseeing, perception.
CHAPTER VI
ELEMENTS OF SHAPE
LET us now examine some of these relations, not in the genealogical or hierarchic order assigned to them by experimental psychology, but in so far as they constitute the elements of shape, and more especially as they illustrate the general principle which I want to impress on the Reader, namely: That the perception of Shape depends primarily upon movements which we make, and the measurements and comparisons which we institute.
And first we must examine mere extension as such, which distinguishes our active dealings with visual and audible sensations from our passive reception of the sensations of taste and smell. For while in the case of the latter a succession of similar stimulations affects us as "more taste of strawberry" or "more smell of rose" when intermittent, or as a vague "there is a strong or faint taste of strawberry" and a "there is a smell of lemon flower"—when continuous; our organ of sight being mobile, reports not "more black on white" but "so many inches of black line on a white ground," that is to say reports a certain extension answering to its own movement. This quality of extension exists also in our sound-perceptions, although the explanation is less evident. Notes do not indeed exist (but only sounding bodies and air-vibrations) in the space which we call "real" because our eye and our locomotion coincide in their accounts of it; but notes are experienced, that is thought and felt, as existing in a sort of imitation space of their own. This "musical space," as M. Dauriac has rightly called it, has limits corresponding with those of our power of hearing or reproducing notes, and a central region corresponding with our habitual experience of the human voice; and in this "musical space" notes are experienced as moving up and down and with a centrifugal and centripetal direction, and also as existing at definite spans or intervals from one another; all of which probably on account of presumable muscular adjustments of the inner and auditive apparatus, as well as obvious sensations in the vocal parts when we ourselves produce, and often when we merely think of, them. In visual perception the sweep of the glance, that is the adjustment of the muscles of the inner eye, the outer eye and of the head, is susceptible of being either interrupted or continuous like any other muscular process; and its continuity is what unites the mere successive sensations of colour and light into a unity of extension, so that the same successive colour-and-light-sensations can be experienced either as one extension, or as two or more, according as the glance is continuous or interrupted; the eye's sweep, when not excessive, tending to continuity unless a new direction requires a new muscular adjustment. And, except in the case of an extension exceeding any single movement of eye and head, a new adjustment answers to what we call a change of direction. Extension therefore, as we have forestalled with regard to sound, has various modes, corresponding to something belonging to ourselves: a middle, answering to the middle not of our field of vision, since that itself can be raised or lowered by a movement of the head, but to the middle of our body; and an above and below, a right and a left referable to our body also, or rather to the adjustments made by eye and head in the attempt to see our own extremities; for, as every primer of psychology will teach you, mere sight and its muscular adjustments account only for the dimensions of height (up and down) and of breadth (right and left) while the third or cubic dimension of depth is a highly complex result of locomotion in which I include prehension. And inasmuch as we are dealing with aspects and not with things, we have as yet nothing to do with this cubic or third dimension, but are confining ourselves to the two dimensions of extension in height and breadth, which are sufficient for the existence, the identity, or more correctly the quiddity, of visible shapes.