BY the phrase, "the human contribution," I mean those aspects and elements of esthetic experience that are usually called psychological. It is theoretically conceivable that discussion of psychological factors is not a necessary ingredient of a philosophy of art. Practically, it is indispensable. For historic theories are full of psychological terms, and these terms are not used in a neutral sense, but are charged with interpretations read into them because of psychological theories that have been current. Expunge special meanings given to such terms as sensation, intuition, contemplation, will, association, emotion, and a large part of esthetic philosophy would disappear. Moreover, each one of these terms has different meanings given to it by different schools of psychology. "Sensation," for example, has been treated in ways as far apart as the notion that it is the sole original constitutent of experience and the idea that it is a heritage from low forms of animal life, and hence something to be minimized in human experience. Esthetic theories are filled with fossils of antiquated psychologies and are overlaid with debris of psychological controversies. Discussion of the psychological aspect of esthetics is unavoidable.
Naturally the discussion must be confined to the more generic features of the human contribution. Because of the individual interest and attitude of the artist, because of the individualized character of every concrete work of art, the specifically personal contribution must be sought in works of art themselves. But in spite of the immense disparity of these unique products, there is a constitution common to all normal individuals. They have the same hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; they are fed with the same foods, hurt by the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same remedies, warmed and cooled by the same variations in climate.
To understand the basic psychological factors and to protect ourselves against the errors of false psychologies that play havoc with esthetic philosophies, we recur to our basic principles: Experience is a matter of the interaction of organism with its environment, an environment that is human as well as physical, that includes the materials of tradition and institutions as well as local surroundings. The organism brings with it through its own structure, native and acquired, forces that play a part in the interaction. The self acts as well as undergoes, and its undergoings are not impressions stamped upon an inert wax but depend upon the way the organism reacts and responds. There is no experience in which the human contribution is not a factor in determining what actually happens. The organism is a force, not a transparency.
Because every experience is constituted by interaction between "subject" and "object," between a self and its world, it is not itself either merely physical nor merely mental, no matter how much one factor or the other predominates. The experiences that are emphatically called, because of the dominance of the internal contribution, "mental," have reference, direct or remote, to experiences of a more objective character; they are the products of discrimination, and hence can be understood only as we take into account the total normal experience in which both inner and outer factors are so incorporated that each has lost its special character, In an experience, things and events belonging to the world, physical and social, are transformed through the human context they enter, while the live creature is changed and developed through its intercourse with things previously external to it.
This conception of the production and structure of an experience is, then, the criterion that will be used to interpret and judge the psychological conceptions that have played a chief role in esthetic theory. I say "judge," or criticize, because so many of these conceptions have their source in a separation of organism and environment; a separation that is alleged to be native and original. Experience is supposed to be something that occurs exclusively inside a self or mind or consciousness, something self-contained and sustaining only external relations to the objective scene in which it happens to be set. Then all psychological states and processes are not thought of as functions of a live creature as it lives in its natural surroundings. When the linkage of the self with its world is broken, then also the various ways in which the" self interacts with the world cease to have a unitary connection with one another. They fall into separate fragments of sense, feeling, desire, purpose, knowing, volition. Intrinsic connection of the self with the world through reciprocity of undergoing and doing; and the fact that all distinctions which analysis can introduce into the psychological factor are but different aspects and phases of a continuous, though varied, interaction of self and environment, are the two main considerations that will be brought to bear in the discussion that follows.
Before setting out on any detailed discussion, I shall, however, refer to the way in which sharp psychological distinctions historically originated. They were at first formulations of differences found among the portions and classes of society. Plato provides an almost perfect example of this fact. He openly derived his threefold division of the soul from what he observed in the communal life of his day. He did consciously what many psychologists have done in their classifications without being aware of their source, taking them from differences socially observable while they thought to arrive at them by pure introspection. From mind as it was manifest in the large print version of the community, Plato discriminated the sensuously appetitive and acquisitive faculty, exhibited in the mercantile class; the "spirited" faculty, that of generous outgoing impulse and will, he derived from citizen-soldiers loyal to law and right belief, even at the expense of their personal existence; the rational faculty he found in those who were fit for the making of laws. He found these same differences dominant in different racial groups, the Oriental, the northern barbarians, and the Athenian Greeks.
There are no intrinsic psychological divisions between the intellectual and the sensory aspects; the emotional and ideational; the imaginative and the practical phases of human nature. But there are individuals and even classes of individuals who are dominantly executive or reflective; dreamers or "idealists" and doers; sensualists and the humanely minded; egoists and unselfish; those who engage in routine bodily activity and those who specialize in intellectual inquiry. In a badly ordered society such divisions as these are exaggerated. The well-rounded man and woman are the exception. But just as it is the office of art to be unifying, to break through conventional distinctions to the underlying common elements of the experienced world, while developing individuality as the manner of seeing and expressing these elements, so it is the office of art in the individual person, to compose differences, to do away with isolations and conflicts among the elements of our being, to utilize oppositions among them to build a richer personality. Hence the extraordinary ineptitude of a compartmentalized psychology to serve as an instrument for a theory of art.
Extreme instances of the results of separation of organism and the world are not infrequent in esthetic philosophy. Such a separation lies behind the idea that esthetic quality does not belong to objects as objects but is projected into them by mind. It is the source of the definition of beauty as "objectified pleasure" instead of as pleasure in the object, so much in it that the object and pleasure are one and undivided in the experience. In other fields of experience a preliminary distinction between self and object is not only legitimate but necessary. An investigator must constantly distinguish as best he can between those parts of an experience that come from himself in the way of suggestions and hypotheses, and the influence of personal desire for a certain result, and the properties of the object inquired into. Improvements in scientific technique are devised for the express purpose of facilitating this distinction. Prejudice, preconceptions and desire influence native tendencies in judgment to such an extent that especial pains must be taken to become aware of them so that they may be eliminated.
A like obligation is imposed upon those engaged in manipulation of materials and execution of projects. They need to maintain the attitude of saying "this belongs to me while that inheres in the objects dealt with." Otherwise they will not keep their eye "upon the ball." The fuzzy sentimentalist is one who permits his own feelings and wishes to color that which he takes to be the object. An attitude that is indispensable to success in thinking and in practical planning and execution becomes a deep-seated habit. A person can hardly cross a street where traffic is swift and crowded save as he keeps in mind differences which philosophers formulate in terms of "subject" and "object." The professional thinker (and naturally he is the one who writes treatises on esthetic theory) is the one who is most perpetually haunted by the difference between self and the world. He approaches discussion of art with a reenforced bias, and one, which, most unfortunately, is just the one most fatal to esthetic understanding. For the uniquely distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no such distinction of self and object exists in it, since it is esthetic in the degree in which organism and environment cooperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears.
When an experience is once recognized to be causally dependent upon the way in which self and objects interact, there is no mystery about what is called "projection." When a landscape is seen as yellow with yellow spectacles or by jaundiced eyes, there is no shooting of yellow, like a projectile, into the landscape from the self. The organic factor in causal interaction with the environmental produces the yellow of the landscape, in the same way in which hydrogen and oxygen when interacting produce water that is wet. A writer on psychiatry tells a story of a man who complained of the discordant sound of church bells when in fact the sound was musical. Examination showed that his betrothed had jilted him to marry a clergyman. Here Was "projection" with a vengeance. Not, however, because something psychical was miraculously extruded from the self and shot into the physical object, but because the experience of the sound of bells was dependent upon an organism that was so twisted as to act abnormally as a factor in certain situations. Projection in fact is a case of transferred values, "transfer" being accomplished through the organic participation of a being that has been made what it is and caused to act as it does through organic modifications due to prior experiences.
It is a familiar fact that colors of a landscape become more vivid when seen with the head upside down. The change of physical position does not cause a new psychical element to be injected, but it does signify that a somewhat different organism is acting, and difference in the cause is bound to make a difference in the effect. Instructors in drawing strive to bring about a recovery of the original innocency of the eye. Here it is a question of affecting a disassociation of elements that have, in prior experience, got so bound together that an experience is induced which works against representation upon a two-dimensional surface. The organism that is set to experience in terms of touch has to be reconditioned to experience space-relations as nearly as possible in terms of the eye. The kind of projection usually involved in esthetic vision involves an analogous relaxation of a strain built up in pursuit of special ends so that the whole personality may interact freely without deflection or restriction so as to reach a particular and preconceived outcome. First hostile reactions to a new mode in an art are usually due to unwillingness to perform some needed disassociation.
The misconception of what takes place in what is called projection is, in short, wholly dependent upon failure to see that self, organism, subject, mind — whatever term is used — denotes a factor which interacts causally with environing things to produce an experience. The same failure is found when the self is regarded as the bearer or carrier of an experience instead of a factor absorbed in what is produced, as once more in the case of the gases that produce water. When control of formation and development of an experience is needed, we have to treat the self as its bearer; we have to acknowledge the causal efficacy of the self in order to secure responsibility. But this emphasis upon the self is for a special purpose, and it disappears when the need for control in a specified predetermined direction no longer exists — as it assuredly does not exist in an esthetic experience, although in case of the new in art it may be a preliminary to having an esthetic experience.
As intelligent a critic as I. A. Richards falls into the fallacy. He writes: "We are accustomed to say that the picture is beautiful instead of saying that it causes an experience in us which is valuable in certain ways. . . . When what we ought to say is that they (certain objects) cause effects in us of one kind or another, the fallacy of projecting the effect and making it a part of the cause tends to recur." What is overlooked is that it is not the painting as a picture (that is, the object in esthetic experience) that causes certain effects "in us." The painting as a picture is itself a total effect brought about by the interaction of external "and organic causes. The external causal factor is vibrations of light from pigments on canvas variously reflected and refracted. It is ultimately that which physical science discovers — atoms, electrons, protons. The picture is the integral outcome of their interaction with what the mind through the organism contributes. Its "beauty," which, I agree with Mr. Richards, is simply a short term for certain valued qualities, in being an intrinsic part of the total effect, belongs to the picture just as much as do the rest of its properties.
The reference to "in us" is as much an abstraction from the total experience, as on the other side it would be to resolve the picture into mere aggregations of molecules and atoms. Even anger and hate are partly caused by us rather than in us. Not that we are the sole cause, but that our own make-up is a contributing causal factor. It is true that most art, up to the time of the Renaissance, seems to us impersonal, dealing with "universal" phases of the experienced world, in comparison with the role of the individual's experience in modern art. Not perhaps till the nineteenth century did consciousness of the rightful place of the strictly personal factor play any large role in plastic and literary arts. The novel of the "stream of consciousness" marks a definite date in the course of changing experience, as much so as impressionism in painting. The longer course of every art is marked by shifts of emphasis. Already we are in the presence of a reaction toward the impersonal and the abstract. These shifts in art are connected with large rhythms in human history. But even the art that allows least play to individual variations — like, say, the religious painting and sculpture of the twelfth century — is not mechanical and hence it bears the stamp of personality; and the classicist paintings of the seventeenth century reflect, like those of Nicholas Poussin, a personal predilection in substance and form, while the most "individualized" paintings never get away from some aspect or phase of the objective scene.
Variations in what we may call the ratio of personal and impersonal, subjective and objective, concrete and abstract factors, are perhaps the very things that lead the psychological aspect of esthetic theory and criticism astray. Writers in each period tend to take as what is uppermost in the art tendencies of their own day as the normal psychological base of all art. The consequence is that those eras and aspects of the past and of alien countries most similar and dissimilar to existing tendencies undergo waves of appreciation and depreciation. A catholic philosophy based on understanding of the constant relation of self and world amid variations in their actual contents would render enjoyment wider and more sympathetic. We could then enjoy Negro sculpture as well as Greek; Persian paintings as well as those of the sixteenth century by Italian painters.
Whenever the bond that binds the living creature to his environment is broken, there is nothing that holds together the various factors and phases of the self. Thought, emotion, sense, purpose, impulsion fall apart, and are assigned to different compartments of our being. For their unity is found in the cooperative roles they play in active and receptive relations to the environment. When elements united in experience are separated, the resulting esthetic theory is bound to be one-sided. I may illustrate from the vogue which the concept of contemplation, understood in a narrow way, has enjoyed in esthetics. At first sight, "contemplation" appears to be about as inept a term as could be selected to denote the excited and passionate absorption that often accompanies experience of a drama, a poem, or a painting. Attentive observation is certainly one essential factor in all genuine perception including the esthetic. But how does it happen that this factor is reduced to the bare act of contemplation?
The answer, so far as psychological theory is concerned, is to be found in Kant's Critique of Judgment. Kant was a past-master in first drawing distinctions and then erecting them into compartmental divisions. The effect upon subsequent theory was to give the separation of the esthetic from other modes of experience an alleged scientific basis in the constitution of human nature. Kant had referred knowledge to one division of our nature, the faculty of understanding working in conjunction with sense-materials. He had referred ordinary conduct, as prudential, to desire which has pleasure for its object, and moral conduct to the Pure Reason operating as a demand upon Pure Will.* Having disposed of Truth and the Good, it remained to find a niche for Beauty, the remaining term in the classic trio. Pure Feeling remained, being "pure" in the sense of being isolated and self-enclosed; feeling free from any taint of desire; feeling that strictly speaking is non-empirical. So he bethought himself of a faculty of Judgment which is not reflective but intuitive and yet not concerned with objects of Pure Reason. This faculty is exercised in Contemplation, and the distinctively esthetic element is the pleasure which attends such Contemplation. Thus the psychological road was opened leading to the ivory tower of "Beauty" remote from all desire, action, and stir of emotion.
Although Kant gives no evidence in his writings of any special esthetic sensitivity, it is possible that his theoretic emphasis reflects the artistic tendencies of the eighteenth century. For that century was, generally speaking, till towards its close, a century of "reason" rather than of "passion," and hence one in which objective order and regularity, the invariant element, was almost exclusively the source of esthetic satisfaction — a situation that lent itself to the idea that contemplative judgment and the feeling connected with it are the peculiar differentia of esthetic experience. But if we generalize the idea and extend it to all periods of artistic endeavor, its absurdity is evident. It not only passes over, as if it were irrelevant the doing and making involved in the production of a work of art (and the corresponding active elements in the appreciative response), but it involves an extremely one-sided idea of the nature of perception. It takes as its cue to the understanding of perception what belongs only to the act of recognition, merely broadening the latter to include the pleasure that attends it when recognition is prolonged and extensive. It is thus a theory peculiarly appropriate to a time when the "representative" nature of art is especially marked and when the subject-matter represented is of a "rational" nature — regular and recurrent elements and phases of existence.
Taken at its best, that is to say, with a liberal interpretation, contemplation designates that aspect of perception in which elements of seeking and of thinking are subordinated (although not absent) to the perfecting of the process of perception itself. To define the emotional element of esthetic perception merely as the pleasure taken in the act of contemplation, independent of what is excited by the matter contemplated, results, however, in a thoroughly anseamic conception of art. Carried to its logical conclusion, it would exclude from esthetic perception most of the subject-matter that is enjoyed in the case of architectural structures, the drama, and the novel, with all their attendent reverberations.
Not absence of desire and thought but their thorough incorporation into perceptual experience characterizes esthetic experience, in its distinction from experiences that are especially "intellectual" and "practical." The uniqueness of the object perceived is an obstacle rather than an aid to the investigator. He is interested in it as far as it leads his thought and observation to something beyond itself; to him the object is datum or evidence. Nor does the man whose perception is dominated by desire or appetite enjoy it for its own sake; his interest in it is because of a particular act to which as a consequence his perception may lead; it is a stimulus, rather than an object in which perception may rest with satisfaction. The esthetic percipient is free from desire in the presence of a sunset, a cathedral, or a bouquet of flowers in the sense that his desires are fulfilled in the perception itself. He does not want the object for the sake of something else.
In reading, say, Keats' "St. Agnes Eve," thought is active but at the same time its demands are fully met. The rhythm of expectancy and satisfaction is so internally complete that the reader is not aware of thought as a separate element, certainly not of it as a labor. The experience is marked by a greater inclusiveness of all psychological factors than occurs in ordinary experiences, not by reduction of them to a single response. Such a reduction is an impovrishment. How can an experience that is rich as well as unified be reached by a process of exclusion? A man who finds himself in a field with an angry bull has but one desire and thought: to attain a place of safety. Once in security, he may enjoy the spectacle of untamed power. His satisfaction in his present act, in contrast with that of the effort to escape, may be called one of contemplation; but the latter act marks the fulfillment of many obscure active tendencies, and the pleasure taken is not in the act of contemplation but in the fulfillment of these tendencies in the subject-matter perceived. More imagery and "ideas" are included than attend the act of escape; while if emotion means something conscious and not the mere excited energy of escape, there is much more emotion.
One trouble with the Kantian psychology is that it supposes all "pleasure," save that of "contemplation," to consist wholly of personal and private gratification. Every experience, including the most generous and idealistic, contains an element of seeking, of pressing forward. Only when we are dulled by routine and sunk in apathy does this eagerness forsake us. Attention is built out of an organization of these factors, and a contemplation that is not an aroused and intensified form of attention to material in perception presented through the senses is an idle stare.
"Sensations" are necessarily involved, and are not mere external incidents of the act of perception. The traditional psychology that puts sensation first and impulsion second reverses the actual state of the case. We consciously experience colors because the impulse to look is performed; we hear sounds because we are satisfied in listening. Motor and sensory structure form a single apparatus and effect a single function. Since life is activity, there is always desire whenever activity is obstructed. A painting satisfies because it meets the hunger for scenes having color and light more fully than do most of the things with which we are ordinarily surrounded. In the kingdom of art as well as of righteousness it is those who hunger and thirst who enter. The very dominance of intense sensuous qualities in esthetic objects is itself proof, psychologically speaking, that appetition is there.
Seeking, desire, need, can be fulfilled only through material external to the organism. The hibernating bear cannot live indefinitely upon its own substance. Our needs are drafts drawn upon the environment, at first blindly, then with conscious interest and attention. To be satisfied, they must intercept energy from surrounding things and absorb what they lay hold of. Surplus energy, so-called, of the organism only increases restlessness save as it can feed upon something objective. While instinctive need is impatient and hurries to its discharge (as a spider whose spinning is interfered with will spin itself to death), impulse that has become conscious of itself tarries to amass, incorporate, and digest congenial objective material.*
Perception is therefore at its lowest and its most obscure in the degree that only instinctive need operates. Instinct is in too much haste to be solicitous about its environing relations. Nevertheless instinctive demands and responses serve a double purpose after transformation into conscious demand for congenial matter has supervened. Many impulses of which we are not distinctively aware give body and breadth to the conscious focus. Even more important is the fact that primitive need is the source of attachment to objects. Perception is born when solicitude for objects and their qualities brings the organic demand for attachment to consciousness. If we judge on the basis of production of works of art, instead of that of a preconceived psychology, the absurdity of supposing that need, desire, and affection are excluded together with action from esthetic experience is evident, unless the artist is the one person who has no esthetic experience. Perception that occurs for its own sake is full realization of all the elements of our psychological being.
Here, of course, is the explanation of the balance, the composure, that is characteristic of much esthetic appreciation. As long as light stimulates only the eye, experience of it is thin and poor. When the tendency to turn the eyes and head is absorbed into a multitude of other impulses and it and they become the members of a single act, all impulses are held in a state of equilibrium. Perception instead of some specialized reaction then occurs, and what is perceived is charged with value.
This state may be described as one of contemplation. It is not practical, if by "practical" is meant an action undertaken for a particular and specialized end outside the perception, or for some external consequence. * In the latter case, perception does not exist for its own sake but is limited to a recognition exercised in behalf of ulterior considerations. But this conception of "practical" is a limitation of its significance. Not only is art itself an operation of doing and making — a poiesis expressed in the very word poetry — but esthetic perception demands, as we have seen, an organized body of activities, including the motor elements necessary for full perception.
The chief objection to the associations usually connected with the term "contemplation" is, of course, its seeming aloofness from passionate emotion. I have spoken of a certain internal equilibrium of impulsions found in the act of perception. But even the word "equilibrium" may give rise to a false conception. It may suggest a balance so calm and sedate as to exclude rapture by an absorbing object. It signifies, in fact, only that different impulsions mutually excite and reenforce one another so as to exclude the kind of overt action that leads away from emotionalized perception. Psychologically, deep-seated needs cannot be stirred to find fulfillment in perception without an emotion and affection that, in the end, constitute the unity of the experience. And, as I have noted in other connections, the emotion aroused attends the subject-matter that is perceived, thus differing from crude emotion because it is attached to the movement of the subject-matter toward consummation. To limit esthetic emotion to the pleasure attending the act of contemplation is to exclude all that is most characteristic of it.
It is worthwhile to quote from Keats a passage already cited in part: "As to the poetical character itself ... it is not itself — it has no self. It is everything and nothing — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it fair or foul, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an lago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does not harm from its relish for the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation [Imaginative perception]. A poet is the most un-poetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity — he is continually in and for, and filling some other body. . . . When I am in a room with people, if I am ever free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a very little time annihilated — not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery of children."
The ideas of disinterestedness, detachment and "psychical distance," of which much has been made in recent esthetic theory, are to be understood in the same way as contemplation. "Disinterestedness" cannot signify uninterestedness. But it may be used as a roundabout way to denote that no specialized interest holds sway. "Detachment" is a negative name for something extremely positive. There is no severance of self, no holding of it aloof, but fullness of participation. Even "attachment" fails to convey fully the right idea, for it suggests that self and the esthetic object continue to exist separately although in close connection. Participation is so thorough going that the work of art is detached or cut off from the kind of specialized desire that operates when we are moved to consume or appropriate a thing physically.
The phrase "psychical distance" has been employed to indicate much the same fact. The illustration of the man who enjoys the spectacle of the angry bull is in point. He is not overtly engaged in the scene. He is not stirred to the performance of a particular and special act beyond the perception itself. Distance is a name for a participation so intimate and balanced that no particular impulse acts to make a person withdraw, a completeness of surrender in perception. The person who enjoys a storm at sea unites his impulses with the drama of rushing seas, roaring gale and plunging ship. "Diderot's paradox" exemplifies a similar situation. An actor on the stage is not cold and unmoved in his part, but impulses that would be dominant, were he actually in the scenes that he represents, are transformed by coordination with the interests belonging to him as an artist. Disinterestedness, detachment, psychical distance, all express ideas that apply to raw primitive desire and impulse, but that are irrelevant to the matter of experience artistically organized.
The psychological conceptions that are implied in "rationalistic" philosophies of art are all associated with a fixed separation of sense and reason. The work of art is so obviously sensuous and yet contains such wealth of meaning, that it is defined as a cancellation of the separation, and as an embodiment through sense of the logical structure of the universe. Ordinarily, and apart from fine art, according to the theory, sense conceals and distorts a rational substance that is the reality behind appearances — to which sense perception is limited. The imagination, by means of art, makes a concession to sense in employing its materials, but nevertheless uses sense to suggest underlying ideal truth. Art is thus a way of having the substantial cake of reason while also enjoying the sensuous pleasure of eating it.
But, in fact, the distinction of quality as sensuous and meaning as ideational is not primary but secondary and methodological. When a situation is construed as being or as containing a problem, we set facts that are given through perception on one side and possible meanings for these facts on the other. The distinction is a necessary instrumentality of reflection. The distinction between some elements of subject-matter as rational and others as sensible is always intermediary and transitive. Its office is to lead in the end to a perceptual experience in which the distinction is overcome — in which what were once conceptions become the inherent meanings of material mediated through sense. Even scientific conceptions have to receive embodiment in sense-perception to be accepted as more than ideas.
All observed objects that are identified without reflection (although their recognition may give rise to further reflection) exhibit an integral union of sense quality and meaning in a single firm texture. We recognize with the eye the green of the sea as belonging to the sea, not to the eye, and as a different quality from the green of a leaf; and the gray of a rock as different in quality from that of the lichen growing upon it. In all objects perceived for what they are without need for reflective inquiry, the quality is what it means, namely, the object to which it belongs. Art has the faculty of enhancing and concentrating this union of quality and meaning in a way which vivifies both. Instead of canceling a separation between sense and meaning (asserted to be psychologically normal), it exemplifies in an accentuated and perfected manner the union characteristic of many other experiences through finding the exact qualitative media that fuse most completely with what is to be expressed. The remark previously made concerning differing ratios of the two factors is applicable in this connection. There are whole periods of art, as well as individual works, in which one element predominates as compared with the other. But when the result is art, integration is always effected. In impressionistic painting, an immediate quality dominates. In Cezanne, relations, meanings, with their inevitable tendency toward abstraction, dominate. But, nevertheless, when Cezanne succeeds esthetically the work is accomplished wholly in terms of the qualitative and sensuous medium.
Ordinary experience is often infected with apathy, lassitude and stereotype. We get neither the impact of quality through sense nor the meaning of things through thought. The "world" is too much with us as burden or distraction. We are not sufficiently alive to feel the tang of sense nor yet to be moved by thought. We are oppressed by our surroundings or are callous to them. Acceptance of this sort of experience as normal is the chief cause of acceptance of the idea that art cancels separations that inhere in the structure of ordinary experience. Were it not for the oppressions and monotonies of daily experience, the realm of dream and revery would not be attractive. No complete and enduring suppression of emotion is possible. Repelled by the dreariness and indifference of things which a badly adjusted environment forces upon us, emotion withdraws and feeds upon things of fantasy. These things are built up by an impulsive energy that cannot find outlet in the usual occupations of existence. It may well be under such circumstances that multitudes have recourse to music, theater and the novel to find easy entrance into a kingdom of free floating emotions. But this fact is no ground for the assertion by philosophic theory of an inherent psychological separation of sense and reason, desire and perception.
When, however, theory frames its conception of experience from the situations that drive so many persons to find relief and excitation in the purely fanciful, it is inevitable that the idea of the "practical" should stand in opposition to the properties that belong to a work of art. Much of the current opposition of objects of beauty and use — to use the antithesis most frequently used — is due to dislocations that have their origin in the economic system. Temples have a use; the paintings in them have a use; the beautiful city halls found in many European cities are used for the conduct of public business, and it is not necessary to rehearse the multitude of things produced by peoples we call savages and peasants which charm the eye and touch as well as serve the utilities of partaking of food and of protection. The commonest cheap plate and bowl made by a Mexican potter for domestic use has its own unstereotyped charm.
It has been contended, however, that there is a psychological opposition between objects employed for practical purposes and those that contribute to direct intensity and unity of experience. It has been urged that there is an antithesis in the very structure of our being between the fluent action of practice and the vivid consciousness of esthetic experience. It is said that production and use of goods involve the worker and the user in action that is fluent in the sense of being as mechanical and automatic as possible, while the intense and robust consciousness of a work of art demands the presence of resistances that inhibit such action.* About the latter fact there is no doubt.
It is stated that "utensils can only, through some ceremonial effort, or when imported from some far time or countries, become the source of heightened consciousness, because we flow from a utensil smoothly into the action for which it is designed." As for the producer of utensils, the fact that so many artisans in all times and places have found and taken time to make their products esthetically pleasing seems to me a sufficient answer. I do not see how there could be better proof that prevailing social conditions, under which industry is carried on, are the factors that determine the artistic or non-artistic quality of utensils, rather than anything inherent in the nature of things. As far as the one who uses the utensil is concerned, I do not see why in drinking tea from a cup he is necessarily estopped from enjoying its shape and the delicacy of its material. Not everyone gulps his food and drink in the shortest possible time in obedience to some necessary psychological law.
Just as there is many a mechanic under present industrial conditions who stops to admire the fruit of his labors, holding it off to admire its shape and texture and not merely to examine into its efficiency for practical purposes, and as there is many a milliner and dressmaker who is the more engaged in her work because of appreciation of its esthetic qualities, so those who are not crowded by economic pressure, or who have not given way completely to habits formed in working on a moving belt in a speeded-up industry, have a vivid consciousness in the very process of using utensils. I suppose all of us have heard some men boast of the beauty of their cars and of the esthetic qualities of its performance, even though fewer in numbers than those who brag of the number of miles it can cover in a given time.
The compartmentalized psychology that holds to an intrinsic separation between completeness of perceptual experience is, then, itself a reflection of dominant social institutions that have deeply affected both production and consumption or use. Where the worker produces in different industrial conditions from those which prevail today, his own impulsions tend in the direction of creation of articles of use that satisfy his urge for experience as he works. It seems to me absurd to suppose that preference for mechanically effective execution by means of completely smooth running mental automatisms, and at the expense of quickened consciousness of what he is about, is ingrained in psychological structure. And if our environment, as far as it is constituted by objects of use, consisted of things that are themselves contributory to a heightened consciousness of sight and touch, I do not think anyone would suppose that the act of use is such as to be aesthetic.
A sufficient refutation of the idea in question is supplied by the action of the artist himself. If painter and sculptor have an experience in which action is not automatic, but emotionally and imaginatively dyed, there is in that one fact proof of the invalidity of the notion that action is so fluent as to exclude the elements of resistance and inhibition necessary to heightened consciousness. There may have been a time when the scientific inquirer sat still in his chair to excogitate science. Now his action occurs in a place significantly called a laboratory. If the action of a teacher is so fluent as to exclude emotional and imaginative perception of what he is doing, he may be safely set down as a wooden and perfunctory pedagogue. The same is true of any professional man, a lawyer or doctor. Not only do such actions demonstrate the falsity of the psychological principle laid down, but their experiences often become definitely esthetic in nature. The beauty of a skilled surgical operation is felt by the operator as well as by an onlooker.
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Popular psychology and much so-called scientific psychology have been pretty thoroughly infected by the idea of the separateness of mind and body. This notion of their separation inevitably results in creating a dualism between "mind" and "practice," since the latter must operate through the body. The idea of the separation perhaps arose, in part at least, from the fact that so much of mind at a given time is aloof from action. The separation, when it is once made, certainly confirms the theory that mind, soul, and spirit can exist and go through their operations without any interaction of the organism with its environment. The traditional notion of leisure is thoroughly infected by contrast with the character of onerous labor.
It seems to me, accordingly, that the idiomatic use of the word "mind" gives a much more truly scientific, and philosophic, approach to the actual facts of the case than does the technical one. For in its non-technical use, "mind" denotes every mode and variety of interest in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual, and emotional. It never denotes anything self-contained, isolated from the world of persons and things, but is always used with respect to situations, events, objects, persons and groups. Consider its inclusiveness. It signifies memory. We are reminded of this and that. Mind also signifies attention. We not only keep things in mind, but we bring mind to bear on our problems and perplexities. Mind also signifies purpose; we have a mind to do this and that. Nor is mind in these operations something purely intellectual. The mother minds her baby; she cares for it with affection. Mind is care in the sense of solicitude, anxiety, as well as of active looking after things that need to be tended; we mind our step, our course of action, emotionally as well as thoughtfully. From giving heed to acts and objects, mind comes also to signify, to obey — as children are told to mind their parents. In short "to mind" denotes an activity that is intellectual, to note something; affectional, as caring and liking, and volitional, practical, acting in a purposive way.
Mind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situations in which we find ourselves. Unfortunately, an influential manner of thinking has changed modes of action into an underlying substance that performs the activities in question. It has treated mind as an independent entity which attends, purposes, cares, notices, and remembers. This change of ways of responding to the environment into an entity from which actions proceed is unfortunate, because it removes mind from necessary connection with the objects and events, past, present and future, of the environment with which responsive activities are inherently connected. Mind that bears only an accidental relation to the environment occupies a similar relation to the body. In making mind purely immaterial (isolated from the organ of doing and undergoing), the body ceases to be living and becomes a dead lump. This conception of mind as an isolated being underlies the conception that esthetic experience is merely something "in mind," and strengthens the conception which isolates the esthetic from those modes of experience in which the body is actively engaged with the things of nature and life. It takes art out of the province of the live creature.
In the idiomatic sense of the word "substantial," as distinct from the metaphysical sense of a substance, there is something substantial about mind. Whenever anything is undergone in consequence of a doing, the self is modified. The modification extends beyond acquisition of greater facility and skill. Attitudes and interests are built up which embody in themselves some deposit of the meaning of things done and undergone. These funded and retained meanings become a part of the self. They constitute the capital with which the self notes, cares for, attends, and purposes. In this substantial sense, mind forms the background upon which every new contact with surroundings is projected; yet "background" is too passive a word, unless we remember that it is active and that, in the projection of the new upon it, there is assimilation and reconstruction of both background and of what is taken in and digested.
This active and eager background lies in wait and engages whatever comes its way so as to absorb it into its own being. Mind as background is formed out of modifications of the self that have occurred in the process of prior interactions with environment. Its animus is toward further interactions. Since it is formed out of commerce with the world and is set toward that world nothing can be further from the truth than the idea which treats it as something self-contained and self-enclosed. When its activity is turned upon itself, as in meditation and reflective speculation, its withdrawal is only from the immediate scene of the world during the time in which it turns over and reviews material gathered from that world.
Different kinds of minds are named from the different interests that actuate the gathering and assemblage of material from the encompassing world: the scientific, the executive, the artistic, the business mind. In each there is a preferential manner of selection, retention, and organization. The native constitution of the artist is marked by peculiar sensitiveness to some aspect of the multiform universe of nature and man and by urge to the remaking of it through expression in a preferred medium. These inherent impulsions become mind when they fuse with a particular background of experience. Of this background, traditions form a large part. It is not enough to have direct contacts and observations, indispensable as these are. Even the work of an original temperament may be relatively thin, as well as tending to the bizarre, when it is not informed with a wide and varied experience of the traditions of the art in which the artist operates. The organization of the background with which immediate scenes are approached cannot otherwise be rendered solid and valid. For each great tradition is itself an organized habit of vision and of methods of ordering and conveying material. As this habit enters into native temperament and constitution it becomes an essential ingredient of the mind of an artist. Peculiar sensitiveness to certain aspects of nature is thereby developed into a power.
"Schools" of art are more marked in sculpture, architecture, and painting than in the literary arts. But there has been no great literary artist who did not feed upon the works of the masters of drama, poetry, and eloquent prose. In this dependence upon tradition there is nothing peculiar to art. The scientific inquirer, the philosopher, the technologist, also derive their substance from the stream of culture. This dependence is an essential factor in original vision and creative expression. The trouble with the academic imitator is not that he depends upon traditions, but that the latter have not entered into his mind; into the structure of his own ways of seeing and making. They remain upon the surface as tricks of technique or as extraneous suggestions and conventions as to the proper thing to do.
Mind is more than consciousness, because it is the abiding even though changing background of which consciousness is the foreground. Mind changes slowly through the joint tuition of interest and circumstance. Consciousness is always in rapid change, for it marks the place where the formed disposition and the immediate situation touch and interact. It is the continuous readjustment of self and the world in experience. "Consciousness" is the more acute and intense in the degree of the readjustments that are demanded, approaching the nil as the contact is frictionless and interaction fluid. It is turbid when meanings are undergoing reconstruction in an undetermined direction, and becomes clear as a decisive meaning emerges.
"Intuition" is that meeting of the old and new in which the readjustment involved in every form of consciousness is effected suddenly by means of a quick and unexpected harmony which in its bright abruptness is like a flash of revelation; although in fact it is prepared for by long and slow incubation. Oftentimes the union of old and new, of foreground and background, is accomplished only by effort, prolonged perhaps to the point of pain. In any case, the background of organized meanings can alone convert the new situation from the obscure into the clear and luminous. When old and new jump together, like sparks when the poles are adjusted, there is intuition. This latter is thus neither an act of pure intellect in apprehending rational truth nor a Crocean grasp by spirit of its own images and states.
Because interest is the dynamic force in selection and assemblage of materials, products of mind are marked by individuality, just as products of mechanism are marked by uniformity. No amount of technical skill and craftsmanship can take the place of vital interest; "inspiration" without it is fleeting and futile. A trivial and badly ordered mind accomplishes things like unto itself in art as well as elsewhere, for it lacks the push and centralizing energy of interest. Works of art are measured by display of virtuosity when criteria are carried over from the field of technical invention. Judgment of them on the basis of sheer inspiration overlooks the long and steady work done by an interest always at work below the surface. The perceiver, as much as the creator, needs a rich and developed background which, whether it be painting, in the field of poetry, or music, cannot be achieved except by consistent nurture of interest.
In what precedes, I have said nothing about imagination. "Imagination" shares with "beauty" the doubtful honor of being the chief theme in esthetic writings of enthusiastic ignorance. More perhaps than any other phase of the human contribution, it has been treated as a special and self-contained faculty, differing from others in possession of mysterious potencies. Yet if we judge its nature from the creation of works of art, it designates a quality that animates and pervades all processes of making and observation. It is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole. It is the large and generous blending of interests at the point where the mind comes in contact with the world. When old and familiar things are made new in experience, there is imagination. When the new is created, the far and strange become the most natural inevitable things in the world. There is always some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and this adventure is, in its measure, imagination.
Coleridge used the term "esemplastic" to characterize the work of imagination in art. If I understand his use of the term, he meant by it to call attention to the welding together of all elements, no matter how diverse in ordinary experience, into a new and completely unified experience. "The poet," he said, "diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that (as it were) fuses each to each the faculties of the soul with the subordination of each according to relative dignity and worth, by that synthetic and magical power to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of imagination." Coleridge used the vocabulary of his philosophic generation. He speaks of faculties that are fused and of imagination as if it were another power acting to draw them together.
But one may pass over his verbal mode, and find in what he says an intimation not that imagination is the power that does certain things, but that an imaginative experience is what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that marks a new birth in the world. I do not profess to an exact understanding of what Coleridge meant by his distinction between imagination and fancy. But there can be no doubt of the difference between the kind of experience just indicated and that in which a person deliberately gives familiar experience a strange guise by clothing it in unusual garb, as of a supernatural apparition. In such cases, mind and material do not squarely meet and interpenetrate. Mind stays aloof for the most part and toys with material rather than boldly grasping it. The material is too slight to call forth the full energy of the dispositions in which values and meanings are embodied; it does not offer enough resistance, and so mind plays with it capriciously. At the best, the fanciful is confined to literature wherein the imaginative too easily becomes the imaginary. One has only to think of painting — to say nothing of architecture — to see how remote it is from essential art. Possibilities are embodied in works of art that are not elsewhere actualized; this embodiment is the best evidence that can be found of the true nature of imagination.
There is a conflict artists themselves undergo that is instructive as to the nature of imaginative experience. The conflict has been set forth in many ways. One way of stating it concerns the opposition between inner and outer vision. There is a stage in which the inner vision seems much richer and finer than any outer manifestation. It has a vast and enticing aura of implications that are lacking in the object of external vision. It seems to grasp much more than the latter conveys. Then there comes a reaction; the matter of the inner vision seems wraith-like compared with the solidity and energy of the presented scene. The object is felt to say something succinctly and forcibly that the inner vision reports vaguely, in diffuse feeling rather than organically. The artist is driven to submit himself in humility to the discipline of the objective vision. But the inner vision is not cast out. It remains as the organ by which outer vision is controlled, and it takes on structure as the latter is absorbed within it. The interaction of the two modes of vision is imagination; as imagination takes form the work of art is born. It is the same with the philosophic thinker. There are moments when he feels that his ideas and ideals are finer than anything in existence. But he finds himself obliged to go back to objects if his speculations are to have body, weight, and perspective. Yet in surrendering himself to objective material he does not surrender his vision; the object just as an object is not his concern. It is placed in the context of ideas and, as it is thus placed, the latter acquire solidity and partake of the nature of the object.
Trains of what by courtesy are called ideas become mechanical. They are easy to follow, too easy. Observation as well as overt action is subject to inertia and moves in the line of least resistance. A public is formed that is inured to certain ways of seeing and thinking. It likes to be reminded of what is familiar. Unexpected turns then arouse irritation instead of adding poignancy to experience. Words are particularly subject to this tendency towards automatism. If their almost mechanical sequence is not too prosaic, a writer gets the reputation of being clear merely because the meanings he expresses are so familiar as not to demand thought by the reader. The academic and eclectic in any art is the outcome. The peculiar quality of the imaginative is best understood when placed in opposition to the narrowing effect of habituation. Time is the test that discriminates the imaginative from the imaginary. The latter passes because it is arbitrary. The imaginative endures because, while at first strange with respect to us, it is enduringly familiar with respect to the nature of things.
The history of science and philosophy as well as of the fine arts is a record of the fact that the imaginative product receives at first the condemnation of the public, and in proportion to its range and depth. It is not merely in religion that the prophet is at first stoned (metaphorically at least) while later generations build the commemorative monument. With respect to painting, Constable stated, with almost undue moderation, the universal fact when he said: "In art there are two modes by which men aim at distinction. In the one by a careful application to what others have accomplished, the artist imitates their works or selects and combines their various beauties; in the other, he seeks excellence at its primitive source-nature. In the first, he forms a style upon the study of pictures, and produces either imitative or eclectic art; in the second, by a close observation of nature, he discovers qualities existing in her which have never been portrayed before, and thus forms a style which is original. The results of the one mode, as they repeat that with which the eye is already familiar, are soon recognized and estimated, while the advance of the artist in a new path must necessarily be slow, for few are able to judge of that which deviates from the usual course, or are qualified to judge original studies."* Here is the contrast between the inertia of habit and the imaginative; that is the mind that seeks and welcomes what is new in perception but is enduring in nature's possibilities. "Revelation" in art is the quickened expansion of experience. Philosophy is said to begin in wonder and end in understanding. Art departs from what has been understood and ends in wonder. In this end, the human contribution in art is also the quickened work of nature in man.
Any psychology that isolates the human being from the environment also shuts him off, save for external contacts, from his fellows. But an individual's desires take shape under the influence of the human environment. The materials of his thought and belief come to him from others with whom he lives. He would be poorer than a beast of the fields were it not for traditions that become a part of his mind, and for institutions that penetrate below his outward actions into his purposes and satisfactions. Expression of experience is public and communicating because the experiences expressed are what they are because of experiences of the living and the dead that have shaped them. It is not necessary that communication should be part of the deliberate intent of an artist, although he can never escape the thought of a potential audience. But its function and consequence are to effect communication, and this not by external accident but from the nature he shares with others.
Expression strikes below the barriers that separate human beings from one another. Since art is the most universal form of language, since it is constituted, even apart from literature, by the common qualities of the public world, it is the most universal and freest form of communication. Every intense experience of friendship and affection completes itself artistically. The sense of communion generated by a work of art may take on a definitely religious quality. The union of men with one another is the source of the rites that from the time of archaic man to the present have commemorated the crises of birth, death, and marriage. Art is the extension of the power of rites and ceremonies to unite men, through a shared celebration, to all incidents and scenes of life. This office is the reward and seal of art. That art weds man and nature is a familiar fact. Art also renders men aware of their union with one another in origin and destiny.
*The effect upon German thought of Capitalization has hardly received proper atention.
*The reader will note that I am saying here, in different terms, what was found to be involved in the "Expressive Act."
* Compare what was said about the difference between external means and a medium, p. 205.
*The division between fine and useful art has many supporters. The psychological argument to which the text refers is that of Max Eastman in his Literary Mind, pp. 205—206. As to the nature of the esthetic experience, I am glad to find myself in close accord with what he says.
*It may be that Constable is here using the word "nature" in a somewhat limited sense, corresponding to his interest as a landscape painter. But the contrast between first-hand experience and the second-hand and imitative remains when "nature" is broadened to include all the phases, aspects, and structures of existence.