Part 2 (2/2)

Let us consider once h antagonistic i upon itself, we have defined it; and the line cannot be drawn sharply between these types The visual analogue for equilibriuure or circle; the excursion fro of the pendulum or the sweep of the planet The RETURN is the essential Now it is a conificance of the dictureat drama, novel, or syer, of a different order of impulses from that of the picture The last note is the only possible answer to the first; it contains the first The last scene hasonly as the satisfaction of the first The measure of the perfection of a work of temporal art is thus its IMPLICIT character The end is contained in the beginning--that is thepower of draency, of compulsion, from one point to another, is but confirmation of this view The temporal art tries ever to pass from first to last, which is first It yearns for unity

The dynamic movement of the temporal arts is cyclic, which is ultimately static, of the nature of equilibrium It is only in the wideness of the sweep that the dynamic repose of poetry and music differs from the static activity of picture and statue

Thus the Nature of Beauty is in the relation of means to an end; the means, the possibilities of stimulation in the motor, visual, auditory, and purely ideal fields; the end, a moment of perfection, of self-complete unity of experience, of favorable stimulation with repose Beauty is not perfection; but the beauty of an object lies in its per the perfect moment The experience of this moment, the union of stimulation and repose, constitutes the unique aesthetic emotion

III THE AESTHETIC REPOSE

III THE AESTHETIC REPOSE

THE popular interest in scientific truth has always had its hidden spring in a desire for the marvelous The search for the philosopher's stone has done as end of the elixir of life for exploration and geographical discovery Froestions of the occult, the world settled down into a reasonable understanding of the facts of which they were but the enlarged and grotesque shadows

So it has been with physics and physiology, and so also, preeminently, with the science of mental life Mesmerism, hypnotism, the facts of the alteration, the multiplicity, and the annihilation of personality have each brought us their moments of pleasurable terror, and passed thus into the field of general interest But science can accept no broken chains

For all the thrill of hly strung attention,--at the last turn of the screw,--and that the alternation of personality is after all no ard to the annihilation of the sense of personality, it may be said that no connection with daily experience is at first apparent Scientists, as well as the world at large, have been inclined to look on the loss of the sense of personality as pathological; and yet it may be maintained that it is nevertheless the typical forard as the most valuable

The loss of personality! In that dread thought there lies, to rave

It seems, with such a fate in store, that immortality were futile, and life itself a mockery Yet the idea, when dwelt upon, assue familiarity; it is an old friend, after all Can we deny that all our sweetest hours are those of self-forgetfulness? The language of eious, aesthetic, intellectually creative, testifies clearly to the fading of the consciousness of self as feeling nears the white heat Not only in the speechless, stark ies of religious ecstasy, aesthetic pleasure, and creative inspiration, is to be traced e know as the loss of the feeling of self Bernard of Clairvaux dwells on ”that ecstasy of deification in which the individual disappears in the eternal essence as the drop of water in a cask of wine” Says Meister Eckhart, ”Thou shalt sink away froh shalt flow into His self- possession, the very thought of Thine shall melt into His Mine;”

and St Teresa, ”The soul, in thus searching for its God, feels with a very lively and very sweet pleasure that is is fainting ale of aesthetic emotion

Philosopher and poet have but one expression for the universal experience Says Keats in the ”Ode to a Nightingale:”--

”My heart aches, and a drowsy nuh of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One h envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thy happiness”

And in Schopenhauer we read that he who conteets even his individuality, his will, and only continues to exist as the pure subject, the clear ious enthusiast and the worshi+per of beauty ”lose themselves” in ecstasy The ”fine frenzy” of the thinker is typical From Archimedes, whose life paid the forfeit of his i in one spot from dawn to dawn, to Newton and Goethe, there is but one forhest effort to penetrate and to create

Ereatness consists in the fullness in which an ecstatic state is realized in him”

The temporary evaporation of the consciousness of one's own Personality is then decidedly not a pathological experience

It seenized as such in popular judghest achievement Perhaps it is the very assuhts that has veiled the psychological problereat deeds are done in forgetfulness of self But why should we forget ourselves in doing great deeds? Why not as well feel in every act its reverberation on the self,--the renewed assurance that it is I who can? Why not, in each aesthetic thrill, awake anew to the consciousness of myself as ruler in a realm of beauty? Why not, in the rush of intellectual production, glory that ”dom is”? And yet the facts are otherwise: in proportion to the intensity and value of the experience is its approach to the objective, the impersonal, the ecstatic state Then how explain this anoious, aesthetic, and intellectual erees by the loss of self-consciousness? Why should the sense of personality play us so strange a trick as to vanish, at the reatest power, in the very shadow of its own glory?

If noe put the most obvious question, and ask, in explanation of its escapades, what the true nature of this personality is, we shall find ourselves quite out of our reckoning on the vast sea of metaphysics To knohat personality IS, ”root and all, and all in all,” is to ”knohat God and man is” Fortunately, our problem is much more si, that vanishes; no, nor even the psychological system of dispositions We remain, in such a moment of ecstasy, as persons, ere before It is the FEELING of personality that has faded; and to find out in what this will-o'-the-wisp feeling of personality resides is a task wholly within the powers of psychological analysis Let no one object that the depth and value of experience seeist's microscope The place of the full-orbed personality in a world of noble ends is not affected by the possibility that the centre of its conscious crystallization le sensation

The explanation, then, of this apparent inconsistency--the fading away of self in the midst of certain most i of personality What is that feeling? On what is it based? How can it be described?

The difficulties of introspection have led many to deny the possibility of such self-fixation The fleeting ; the Ego has slipped away like a drop of ers Like the hero of the German poet, anted his queue in front,

”Then round and round, and out and in, All day that puzzled sage did spin; In vain; itbehind him,”

when I turn round upon , I can never lay hold on anything but a sensation I may peel off, like the leaves of an artichoke, my social self,-- my possessions and positions, my friends, my relatives; my active self,--my books and implements of work; my clothes; even my flesh, and sit inever to an inner citadel; but Imoves in there That is not what my self IS, but what the elusive sprite feels like when I have got er on him In daily experience, however, it is unnecessary to proceed to such extreiven roup of eleroup is, we say, before the attention, and is not at that ue, undifferentiated, not attended to, but felt Any eleround can detach itself and coround of attention I becoht of my shoulders as they rest on the back of s to my self no more than does the sensation of the smoothness of the paper on which my hand rests I know I around and the background of ivesof transition, hunted to its lair, reveals itself as nothing ans which adapt themselves to the new conditions I look on that picture and on this, and know that they are two, because the change in the adaptation of ans to their objects has been felt I close e in the sensations from my eye muscles that tells me I have passed between the two; or, to express it otherwise, that it is in me the two have succeeded each other While the self in its widest sense, therefore, is co-extensive with consciousness, the distinctive feeling of self as opposed to the elements in consciousness which represent the outer world is based on those bodily sensations which are connected with the relations of objects

My world--the foreground of my consciousness--would fall in on me and crush me, if I could not hold it off by just this power to feel it different froh the ans in passing fro of transition, and hence of the feeling of personality, is then the presence in consciousness of at least two possible objects of attention; and the forht line connecting two points, in which one point represents the foreground, and the other the background, of consciousness

Ifaccept this view, and ask under what conditions the sense of self ested

It will happen when the ”twoness” disappears, so that the line connecting and separating the two objects in our scheround or foreground tends to disappear or to round makes an indissoluble unity or unbreakable circle, the content of consciousness approaches absolute unity There is no ”relating” to be done, no ”transition” to beof personality is no longer present, and there results a feeling of complete unity with the object of attention; and if this object of attention is itself without parts or differences, there results an eaze, ht until all my bodily sensations have faded Then one of the ”points”