intensity of concentration which takes on its color makes
it seem so. The "rapture" is just the sense of being caught
up into union with the highest; the joy of the rapture is
the joy of every thought of God, here left free to brighten
into ecstasy; and its "revelation-value" is again the sense
of immediate union with a Being the intellectual concept of
whom is immensely vivified.

So may be analyzed the aesthetic ecstasy. The tension of
those mutually antagonistic impulses which make balance, and
so unity, and so the conditions for loss of sense of self,
clears the way for tasting the full savor of pleasure in
bright color, flowing line, exquisite tone-sequence, moving
thought. Many a commonplace experience, says M. Souriau,
suddenly takes on a charm when seen in the arrested aesthetic
vision. "Every one can have observed that an object in itself
agreeable to look on, like a bouquet of flowers, or the fresh
face of a young girl, takes on a sort of magic and supernatural
beauty if we regard it mechanically while listening to music."<1>
The intensity of concentration caused by the unity of form
fuses with this suggested vividness of feeling from content
and material, and the whole is felt as intensity of aesthetic
emotion. The Sistine Madonna would not strike so deep in
feeling were it less crystalline in its unity, less trance-like
in its repose, and so less enchanting in its suggestion.

<1> P. Souriau, _La Suggestion en l'Art._

So it is not only the man of achievement who sees but one thing
at a time. To enter intensely into any ideal experience means