The Psychology of Beauty by Ethel Dench Puffer Howes
page 67 of 236 (28%)
page 67 of 236 (28%)
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the worthy countryman who interrupts the play with cries for
justice on the villain, but in him who creates the drama again with the poet, who lives over again in himself each of the thrills of emotion passing before him, and loses himself in their web. The object is a unity or our whirling circle of impulses, as you like to phrase it. At any rate, out of that unity the soul does not return upon itself; it remains one with it in the truest sense. The loss of the sense of personality is an integral part of the aesthetic experience; and we have seen how it is a necessary psychological effect of the unity of the object. From another point of view it may be said that the unity of the object is constituted just by the inhibition of all tendency to movement through the balance or centrality of impulses suggested by it. In other words, the balance of impulses makes us feel the object a unity. And this balance of impulses, this inhibition of movement, corresponding to unity, is what we know as aesthetic repose. Thus the conditions of aesthetic repose and of the loss of self-feeling are the same. In fact, it might be said that, within this realm, the two conceptions are identical. The true aesthetic repose is just that perfect rest in the beautiful object which is the essence of the loss of the sense of personality. Subtler and rarer, again, than the raptures of mysticism and of beauty worship is the ecstasy of intellectual production; yet the "clean, clear joy of creation," as Kipling names it, is not less to be grouped with those precious experiences in which the self is sloughed away, and the soul at one with its |
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