amphora, for example, is due, partially at least, to association with
lines of the human body, with which normally this feeling is associated.
The associated object, together with its feeling tone, are sufficiently
common to the experience of all men to account for the universality
of the emotion, and the isolation of the stimulus--abstract line--from
its usual context of color and bulk accounts for the vagueness.
Sometimes, on the other hand, expressiveness seems to be due to a
direct psychological relation between the sense-stimulus and the
emotion. This is almost certainly the case with rhythms, and, as I
shall argue in the chapters on painting and music, is at least partially
true of colors and tones. The expressiveness is at once too immediate
and too universal to depend upon association with definite things and
events, or personal, emotional crises. A rhythm, for example, may be
exciting the first time it is heard; one does not have to wait to hear
it at a battle-charge; a melody may be sad even when one has never
heard it sung by chance at parting. Of course the fact that associations
are not remembered is no proof that they do not operate; but it is
difficult to conceive of any which could operate in these cases. For
this reason, I think, we must suppose that certain sense-stimuli and
combinations of stimuli not only produce in the sensory areas of the
brain the appropriate sensations, but that their effects are prolonged,
overflowing into the motor channels and there causing a total reaction
of the organism, the conscious aspect of which is a vague feeling. The
organic resonance is too slight and diffuse to produce a true emotion;
hence only a mood results.

In all the representative arts the vague expressiveness of the medium
is reinforced through emotions aroused by ideas which interpret
sensation as an element of a thing. The green in the painting is not
only green, but green of the sea; the red is not only red, but red of