CHAPTER IV

THE ANALYSIS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: THE ELEMENTS OF THE EXPERIENCE


Thus far we have sought to define art, to form a concrete idea of the
experience of art, and to place it in its relations to other facts.
We shall now pass from synthetic definition to psychological analysis.
We want to pick out the elements of mind entering into the experience
of art and exhibit their characteristic relations. In the present
chapter we shall concern ourselves chiefly with the elements, leaving
the study of most of the problems of structure to the following chapter.

Every experience of art [Footnote: Throughout this discussion, I use
"experience of art," "aesthetic experience," and "beauty" with the same
meaning.] contains, in the first place, the sensations which are the
media of expression. In a painting, for example, there are colors; in
a piece of music, tones; in a poem, word-sounds. To this material,
secondly, are attached vague feelings. It is characteristic of aesthetic
expressions, as we have observed, that their media, quite apart from
anything that they may mean or represent, are expressive of moods--the
colors of a painting have a _stimmung,_ so have tones and words,
when rhythmically composed. The simplest aesthetic experiences, like
the beauty of single musical tones or colors, are of no greater
complexity; yet almost all works of art contain further elements; for
as a rule the sensations do not exist for their own sakes alone, but
possess a function, to represent things. The colors of a landscape