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The Psychology of Beauty by Ethel Dench Puffer Howes
page 67 of 236 (28%)
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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