THE PLEASURES OF VISUAL FORM. 787 



that the resting eye's perception of form consists of a mass of motor 

 feeling ideally represented. In other words, it is made up of a num- 

 ber of imperfectly distinguished imaginations of movement in different 

 directions, etc. And these representative feelings are very various in 

 character, since we are vaguely aware that any fixed line, for example, 

 offers a choice of movement in two directions, and of an indefinite 

 number of velocities. Now, if we conceive that the feelings of move- 

 ment thus represented in a confused aggi-egate are distinctly pleasur- 

 able ones, it must follow that such a condition, of what I may call the 

 motor imagination, will be a highly agreeable one. It will involve a 

 vague consciousness of a wealth of motor experience and a rich area 

 of selection. It has been said that the possibilities of enjoyment in 

 valuable possessions, as wealth and friends, often count more than the 

 amount of actual enjoyment we are ever likely to get out of them. 

 This remark may apply to that recognition of the possibilities of 

 pleasurable movement which every beautiful form supplies to the rest- 

 ing eye. 



The capability of simultaneous local recognition by the eye would 

 seem in this way greatly to enrich its enjoyment of form. Our appre- 

 ciation of a beautiful line includes a transition from a state of actual 

 movement with its definite motor feelings to a state of actual repose 

 with the imagination of movement only, and of relatively indefinite 

 feelings of movement. 



To verify these deductions, it would be necessary to show that all 

 agreeable forms, up to the most beautiful, do answer to pleasurable 

 ocular movements. In a general way this will be found to be so. A 

 beautiful figure is one which selects such elements of form, together 

 with combinations of these, as supply the eye with the more agreeable 

 varieties of motor experience already spoken of. The selection of 

 curved lines, the preference for horizontal lines (which seems to be 

 exemplified in the feeling for bilateral symmetry), the taste for con- 

 tinuous forms or contour arrangements, for the grouping of parts about" 

 a center and for symmetrical balance (which answer no less to the 

 natural conditions of easy movement than they do to the arrangements 

 of the retina itself), all this seems to show how closely beauty of form 

 is conditioned by the laws of agreeable movement. 



At the same time, what we call a beautiful form is sometimes 

 ready to sacrifice this pleasure of movement ; and it does so just be- 

 cause it can command another kind of gratification — namely, an intel- 

 lectual pleasure in the recognition of relations. To this new factor we 

 may now pass. I have already remarked that the moving eye, capable 

 of successive experiences only, would not attain to any very complex 

 perceptions of relations of parts. The capability of the eye in the 

 delicate discrimination of shades of direction and distance, and still 

 more in the coordination of manifold details under some aspect of 

 unity, seems to be inseparably bound up with the fact of simul- 



