Chapter XXI Conclusion (Evolutional)
Some of my Readers, not satisfied by the answer implicit in the last chapter and indeed in the whole of this little book, may ask a final question concerning our subject. Not: What is the use of Art? since, as we have seen, Art has many and various uses both to the individual and to the community, each of which uses is independent of the attainment of Beauty.
The remaining question concerns the usefulness of the very demand for Beauty, of that Aesthetic Imperative by which the other uses of art are more or less qualified or dominated. In what way, the Reader may ask, has sensitiveness to Beauty contributed to the survival of mankind, that it should not only have been preserved and established by evolutional selection, but invested with the tremendous power of the pleasure and pain alternative?
The late William James, as some readers may remember, placed musical pleasure between sentimental love and sea-sickness as phenomena unaccountable by any value for human survival, in fact masteries, if not paradoxes, of evolution.
The riddle, though not necessarily the mystery, does not consist in the survival of the aesthetic instinct of which the musical one is a mere sub-category, but in the origin and selectional establishment of its elementary constituents, say for instance space-perception and empathy, both of which exist equally outside that instinct which is a mere compound of them and other primary tendencies. For given space-perception and empathy and their capacity of being felt as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, the aesthetic imperative is not only intelligible but inevitable. Instead therefore of asking: Why is there a preference for what we call Beauty? we should have to ask: why has perception, feeling, logic, imagination, come to be just what it is? Indeed why are our sense-organs, our bodily structure and chemical composition, what they are; and why do they exist at all in contradistinction to the ways of being of other living or other inanimate things? So long as these elementary facts continue shrouded in darkness or taken for granted, the genesis and evolutional reason of the particular compound which we call aesthetic preference must remain only one degree less mysterious than the genesis and evolutional reason of its psychological components.
Meanwhile all we can venture to say is that as satisfaction derived from shapes we call beautiful, undoubtedly involves intense, complex, and reiterative mental activities, as it has an undeniable power for happiness and hence for spiritual refreshment, and as it moreover tends to inhibit most of the instincts whose superabundance can jeopardise individual and social existence, the capacity for such aesthetic satisfaction, once arisen, would be fostered in virtue of a mass of evolutional advantages which are as complex and difficult to analyse, but also as deep-seated and undeniable, as itself.
I. Lipps. Raumaesthetik, Leipzig, 1897.
" Aesthetik, vol. I. part ii., Leipzig, 1906.
II. Karl Groos. Aesthetik, Giessen, 1892.
" Der Aesthetische Genuss, Giessen, 1902.
III. Wundt. Physiologische Psychologie (5th Edition, 1903), vol. III. pg. 107 to 209. But the whole volume is full of indirect suggestion on aesthetics.
IV. Münsterberg. The Principles of Art Education, New York, 1905. (Statement of Lipps’ theory in physiological terms.)
V. Külpe. Der gegenwärtige Stand der experimentellen Aesthetik, 1907.
VI. Vernon Lee and Anstruther-Thomson. Beauty and Ugliness, 1912 (contains abundant quotations from most of the above works and other sources).
VII. Ribot. Le Rôle latent des Images Motrices. Revue Philosophique, March 1912.
VIII. Witasek. Psychologie der Raumwahrnehmung des Auges (1910). These two last named are only indirectly connected with visual aesthetics.