268 THE FACT OF BEAUTY 



" Plant lovelier in its own recess 

 Than Grecian naiad seen at earliest dawn 

 Tending her font, or Lady of the lake 

 Sole sitting by the shores of old romance." 



In the first place, our enjoyment has a sensory or physi- 

 ological factor. What we see sets up agreeable rhythmic 

 processes in our eyes, and agreeable rhythmic messages — 

 waves of chemical reaction if you will — pass to our brain, 

 and the good news — the pleasedness — is echoed throughout 

 the body, — in the pulse, for instance, and the beating of the 

 heart. Wordsworth was a better physiologist than he knew 

 when he said, '^ my heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow 

 in the sky ", or again, " And then my heart with pleasure 

 fills, and dances with the daffodils ''. As with music, so 

 with beautiful sights external rhythms are often echoed 

 in internal rhythms, and rhythms are pleasant. It is easy 

 enough to burlesque the idea of the physiological factor in 

 aesthetic delight, but the sensory thrill is always there, and 

 in simple cases, where perception is not wide awake, it may 

 be predominant. We cannot enter into the difficult question 

 of the precise relation of the bodily resonance to the aesthetic 

 emotion, in connection with which three views have been 

 held. They are thus stated by Sherrington: — (a) that emo- 

 tion is first aroused and that its nervous correlate excites 

 bodily resonance; (h) that the stimulus excites the mind 

 and the nervous centres for visceral resonance concurrently; 

 and (c) that the stimulus acts on centres ruling the viscera, 

 and that the visceral sensations, laden with affective quality, 

 induce the emotion. We adhere to Sherrington's conclusion, 

 that the visceral resonance is secondary to the cerebral ex- 

 citement and the associated emotion, that it reinforces rather 

 than initiates the joy. 



