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قراءة كتاب The Beautiful An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics
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The Beautiful An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics
have pointed out with reference to the constellations. Thus a circle, say of red patches, excludes some of the white paper on which it is drawn; but it includes or encloses the rest. Place a red patch somewhere on that enclosed blank; our glance and attention will now play not merely along the red circumference, but to and fro between the red circumference and the red patch, thereby establishing imaginary but thoroughly measured and compared lines between the two. Draw a red line from the red patch to the red circumference; you will begin expecting similar lengths on the other sides of the red patch, and you will become aware that these imaginary lines are, or are not, equal; in other words, that the red patch is, or is not, equidistant from every point of the red circumference. And if the red patch is not thus in the middle, you will expect, and imagine another patch which is; and from this imaginary centre you will draw imaginary lines, that is you will make by no means imaginary glance-sweeps, to the red circumference. Thus you may go on adding real red lines and imaginary lines connecting them with the circumference; and the more you do so the more you will feel that all these real lines and imaginary lines and all the blank space which the latter measure, are connected, or susceptible of being connected, closer and closer, every occasional excursion beyond the boundary only bringing you back with an increased feeling of this interconnexion, and an increased expectation of realising it in further details. But if on one of these glance-flickings beyond the circumference, your attention is caught by some colour patch or series of colour patches outside of it, you will either cease being interested in the circle and wander away to the new colour patches; or more probably, try to connect that outlying colour with the circle and its radii; or again failing that, you will "overlook it," as, in a pattern of concentric circles you overlook a colour band which, as you express it "has nothing to do with it," that is with what you are looking at. Or again listening to. For if a church-bell mixes its tones and rythm with that of a symphony you are listening to, you may try and bring them in, make a place for them, expect them among the other tones or rythms. Failing which you will, after a second or two, cease to notice those bells, cease to listen to them, giving all your attention once more to the sonorous whole whence you have expelled those intruders; or else, again, the intrusion will become an interruption, and the bells, once listened to, will prevent your listening adequately to the symphony.
Moreover, if the number of extensions, directions, real or imaginary lines or musical intervals, alternations of something and nothing, prove too great for your powers of measurement and comparison, particularly if it all surpass your habitual interplay of recollection and expectation, you will say (as before an over intricate pattern or a piece of music of unfamiliar harmonies and rythm) that "you can't grasp it"—that you "miss the hang of it." And what you will feel is that you cannot keep the parts within the whole, that the boundary vanishes, that what has been included unites with the excluded, in fact that all shape welters into chaos. And as if to prove once more the truth of our general principle, you will have a hateful feeling of having been trifled with. What has been balked and wasted are all your various activities of measuring, comparing and co-ordinating; what has been trifled with are your expectations. And so far from contemplating with satisfaction the objective cause of all this vexation and disappointment, you will avoid contemplating it at all, and explain your avoidance by calling that chaotic or futile assemblage of lines or of notes "ugly."