As has just been pointed out, this reduces itself to the error of
wishing to seek a passage from the quality of the content to that of the
form. To ask, in fact, what the aesthetic senses may be, implies asking
what sensible impressions may be able to enter into aesthetic
expressions, and what must of necessity do so. To this we must at once
reply, that all impressions can enter into aesthetic expressions or
formations, but that none are bound to do so. Dante raised to the
dignity of form not only the "sweet colour of the oriental sapphire"
(visual impression), but also tactile or thermic impressions, such as
the "thick air" and the "fresh rivulets" which "parch all the more" the
throat of the thirsty. The belief that a picture yields only visual
impressions is a curious illusion. The bloom of a cheek, the warmth of a
youthful body, the sweetness and freshness of a fruit, the cutting of a
sharpened blade, are not these, also, impressions that we have from a
picture? Maybe they are visual? What would a picture be for a
hypothetical man, deprived of all or many of his senses, who should in
an instant acquire the sole organ of sight? The picture we are standing
opposite and believe we see only with our eyes, would appear to his eyes
as little more than the paint-smeared palette of a painter.

Some who hold firmly to the aesthetic character of given groups of
impressions (for example, the visual, the auditive), and exclude others,
admit, however, that if visual and auditive impressions enter _directly_
into the aesthetic fact, those of the other senses also enter into it,
but only as _associated_. But this distinction is altogether arbitrary.
Aesthetic expression is a synthesis, in which it is impossible to
distinguish direct and indirect. All impressions are by it placed on a
level, in so far as they are aestheticised. He who takes into himself
the image of a picture or of a poem does not experience, as it were, a
series of impressions as to this image, some of which have a prerogative