makes it to consist of a junction between form and content, that is, of
impressions plus expressions. In the aesthetic fact, the aesthetic
activity is not added to the fact of the impressions, but these latter
are formed and elaborated by it. The impressions reappear as it were in
expression, like water put into a filter, which reappears the same and
yet different on the other side. The aesthetic fact, therefore, is form,
and nothing but form.

From this it results, not that the content is something superfluous (it
is, on the contrary, the necessary point of departure for the expressive
fact); but that _there is no passage_ between the quality of the content
and that of the form. It has sometimes been thought that the content, in
order to be aesthetic, that is to say, transformable into form, should
possess some determinate or determinable quality. But were that so, then
form and content, expression and impression, would be the same thing. It
is true that the content is that which is convertible into form, but it
has no determinable qualities until this transformation takes place. We
know nothing of its nature. It does not become aesthetic content at
once, but only when it has been effectively transformed. Aesthetic
content has also been defined as what is _interesting_. That is not an
untrue statement; it is merely void of meaning. What, then, is
interesting? Expressive activity? Certainly the expressive activity
would not have raised the content to the dignity of form, had it not
been interested. The fact of its having been interested is precisely the
fact of its raising the content to the dignity of form. But the word
"interesting" has also been employed in another not illegitimate sense,
which we shall explain further on.

[Sidenote] _Critique of the imitation of nature and of the artistic
illusion._