82 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



naively forces on our attention. In other words, in the best periods 

 of art, form only disguises itself, becomes more a matter of imagina- 

 tive reconstruction, and appeals to a finer kind of aesthetic perception. 

 One may add that every now and again the artist will distinctly aim 

 at satisfying the eye's feeling for form by what may almost seem a 

 childish device. Even a Turner does not disdain to please the eye by 

 introducing into his pictures accidental repetitions of form in different 

 objects.* 



All good art thus does homage to the principle of form. One may 

 even go further, and say that the characteristic effect of asymmetry, 

 illustrated in many Japanese designs, is really due to a just feeling for 

 form. Like discords and occasional suspensions of tone interval and 

 equal time in music, such irregularities owe their piquancy to the very 

 sense of a law that is broken, though not violently, but, so to speak, in 

 childish freakishness. 



In this brief analysis of the direct factor in pleasing visual form, I 

 have regarded the immediate activity of the eye as something ulti- 

 mate, only referring now and again to the effects of habit in facilitat- 

 ing certain kinds of motor activity. But modern psychological ideas 

 will enable us to explain to some extent how the eye has come to be so 

 constituted as to take pleasure in the kinds of activity just described. 

 There is no room here for more than a brief elucidation of this aspect 

 of the subject. 



The doctrine of evolution leads us to view an organ of perception, 

 together with its customary modes of action, as slowly determined by 

 the action of the environment and the needs of practical life. A part 

 of this operation goes on in the individual life, having as its result the 

 selection of the habitual actions as the most easy and most agreeable. 

 A part requires the life of the race for its carrying out, and has for its 

 product a certain innate structure and disposition. The modes of 

 agreeable visual perception illustrate these processes of adaptation to 

 the conditions of practical life. Thus, as I have already hinted in 

 passing, the eye's preference for the horizontal direction, for sym- 

 metrical movements of convergence, and so on, may possibly be ex- 

 plained as the result of habits determined by the greater utility of 

 these particular movements. And it is probable, as Wundt suggests, 

 that the innate peculiarities of the eye's mechanism which favor cer- 

 tain kinds of movement, as horizontal, and those from the center of 

 the field, are themselves the result of long processes of racial adapta- 

 tion. 



What applies to the most natural and agreeable modes of ocular 

 movement, applies also to the more pleasurable modes of the higher 

 intellectual appreciation of form. The very feeling for unity of form 

 in any shape is probably related to those deep wants of our existence 



* Mr. Ruskin lays great stress on this effect, which he brings under his " Law of 

 Repetition." 



