Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/22

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i
LAWS OF AN OBJECT
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wards objects; but in both theory and practice he does work upon the objects and alters them; only in the aesthetic attitude he looks at the object and does not try to alter it. How this is reconcilable with the facts of creative art, we shall see below. We might say at once, however, that in creative art the production is as it were a form of perception; it is subordinate to the full imagining, the complete looking or hearing.

ii. Feeling becomes “organised,” “plastic,” or “incarnate.” This character of Aesthetic feeling is all-important. For feeling which has found its incarnation or taken plastic shape cannot remain the passing reaction of a single “body-and-mind.”[1] All the three points first mentioned are at once emphasised. Say you are glad or sorry at something. In common life your sorrow is a more or less dull pain, and its object—what it is about—remains a thought associated with it. There is too apt to be no

  1. This expression, written as I write it here, is essential for aesthetic discussion. In it mind is all body and body is all mind.