lO 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



is a pleasant thing, even if he may not rest under it. Perception will be 

 pleasant if the memories called up are in accordance with one another. 

 To an architect a building with all its detail in the same style would 

 be, in so far, pleasant, but a Gothic porch on a New England colonial 

 farmhouse would be unpleasant to him, even if by some miracle its 

 proportions were harmonious with those of the house. Here his dis- 

 pleasure would be caused by the incongruity of association. Percep- 

 tion will be pleasant if the memories which are stirred by it are in them- 

 selves pleasant. The smell of box bushes on a sunny day may be 

 pleasant to one who loves old colonial gardens, not because of any great 

 pleasure from the smell itself, but because of the pleasant memories 

 called up by the smell. 



In all these cases of pleasure in perception, the pleasure arises in 

 the same way whether the pleasurable thing is a real object perceived 

 at the time, a real object remembered, or an unreal object, created from 

 the stuff of memory by the power of the imagination. And in most of 

 the above cases it is obvious that the cause of the pleasure of percep- 

 tion is some kind of harmony or unity. In a sense it can be said that 

 seeking to discover unities in the world is the whole business of our 

 mental activity, so that unity has a right to the high place which it 

 holds in discussions of design. It is the essence of the existence of 

 objects. Without it there can be no design ; without it in some meas- 

 ure there can be no objects. 

 Pleasure in Intellection — or ideation — is the mental comparison of a number 



Intellection ^f percepts and the discovery of relations among them, thus producing 

 a concept. The pleasure of intellection will depend partly on the ac- 

 complishment of the discovery of these relations, as for instance com- 

 pletion of a task, solution of a puzzle; and partly the pleasure will 

 depend on the number and completeness of the relations discovered, 

 that is, on the unity found to exist among the percepts and between 

 the concept just formed and the rest of the content of the mind. Ex- 

 ceptionally, on the other hand, the pleasure is due to a comic element, 

 as in the case of the "surprise" features in the Italian and older German 

 gardens, which owe the pleasure of their effect, when it is pleasant, to 

 the very incongruity of the experience of their victim with what he 

 would reasonably have expected. 



