THE STUDY OF PERCEPTION AND THE ARCHITECTURAL IDEA.[1]
TO the proposition that there exists to-day no æsthetics of architecture, there would probably be no dissenting voice. Even the columns of the professional and architectural journals are full of laments on the lack of any authoritative theory on the nature of beauty in architecture, or even any satisfactory standard of judgment, while in contemporary philosophy, with a single notable exception, it is the one field of æsthetic inquiry which is consistently neglected.
There might be a division of opinion as to the reason for this state of things, but in my view the cause is the same as for the long absence of any satisfactory theory of the nature of beauty in music: that is, the persistent habit of æsthetic students in neglecting to seek for a single generative principle of beauty in the musical idea itself. So long as one was content to point out on the one side the intelligible structure of music, with clearly defined and related parts, and on the other side its emotional eloquence and power, the principle of beauty in music fell between two stools. Not until the musical idea as such as a principle of unity was acknowledged, was there progress made in musical æsthetics; then the path was opened for the development of that principle of unity, in the tracing out how for reasons to be ultimately explained by physiology one tone calls to another, and issues out of a third, and the way in which their reciprocal relations are reinforced by the rhythm in which they are interwoven. Then the intelligible structure was seen to be the musical idea writ large—become explicit after being implicit; and the emotional language was seen to be a by-product of the manufacture of the pure beauty of tonal unity.
Just the same situation is now to be observed in the field of architecture. On the one hand there is the demand for intel-
- ↑ Read before the American Psychological Association, December 30, 1909
