420 AESTHETICS 



we see it much more markedly in the important studies of Lipps, 

 who shows us how far our appreciation of beauty in nature, and in 

 artistic products, is due to the sympathetic introjection of ourselves 

 as it were into the object, - - to what he calls Einfuhlung. 



But, broad as he shows the applicability of this principle to be, it 

 is clear that we have not in it the solution of the fundamental aesthetic 

 problem with which the psychologist must deal when appealed to by 

 the sesthetician. For no one would claim that all of this sympathetic 

 introjection - - this Einfuhlung - - is aesthetic : the aesthetic Einfuhl- 

 ung is of a special type. Nor to my mind does it seem clearly 

 shown that there are no sources of beauty which do not involve this 

 introjection, as would be the case if we had reached in this principle 

 the solution of the fundamental aesthetico-psychologic problem. For 

 instance, the sense of beauty experienced when I look at some one 

 bright star in the deep blue of the heaven seems to me to be inex- 

 plicable in terms of such introjection. 



All this work, however, brings help to the practical artist and to 

 the critic. They do not acknowledge it fully to-day, but year by year, 

 more and more will the influence of the results of these studies be 

 felt as they gain the attention of thinking men. 



Nevertheless, we cannot but face the fact that the practical benefit 

 to be gained from them is of a negative sort. There is no royal road 

 to the attainment of beauty; but the psychologist is able to point 

 out, by the methods here considered, the inner nature of certain 

 sources of beauty; thus teaching the artist how he may avoid ugliness, 

 and even indicating to him the main direction in which he may best 

 travel toward the attainment of his goal. 



But, after all, the relations thus discovered in the beautiful object, 

 and the related special analyses of mental functioning which are 

 involved with our appreciation of beauty, tell us of but relatively 

 isolated bits of the broad realm of beauty. The objects which arouse 

 within us the sense of beauty are most diverse, and equally diverse 

 are the modes of mental functioning connected with the appreciation 

 of their beauty. 1 



And this has led to the formulation of such principles as that of 

 the " unity of manifoldness " of which Fechner makes so much, and 

 that of the monarchischen Unterordnung which Lipps has more lately 

 enunciated. 



It is indeed of great interest to inquire why it is that the processes 

 which lead to the recognition of these principles are so clearly defined 

 in many cases where the sense of beauty is aroused. But very evi- 

 dently these general principles, important though they be in them- 



Nothing has shown this more clearly than the investigations of Haines and 

 Davies in reference to the Golden Section of which we have spoken above. See 

 Psychological Review, xi, 415. 



