capable of receiving direct pleasure from a work of art, are generally
led on to the further pleasures of self-consciousness. The fact that the
psychical process of recognition goes forward with the unusual intensity
of 4 to 2, overwhelms them with the sense of having twice the capacity
they had credited themselves with: their whole personality is enhanced,
and, being aware that this enhancement is connected with the object in
question, they for some time after take not only an increased interest
in it, but continue to realise it with the new intensity. Precisely this
is what form does in painting: it lends a higher coefficient of reality
to the object represented, with the consequent enjoyment of accelerated
psychical processes, and the exhilarating sense of increased capacity in
the observer. (Hence, by the way, the greater pleasure we take in the
object painted than in itself.)

And it happens thus. We remember that to realise form we must give
tactile values to retinal sensations. Ordinarily we have considerable
difficulty in skimming off these tactile values, and by the time they
have reached our consciousness, they have lost much of their strength.
Obviously, the artist who gives us these values more rapidly than the
object itself gives them, gives us the pleasures consequent upon a more
vivid realisation of the object, and the further pleasures that come
from the sense of greater psychical capacity.

Furthermore, the stimulation of our tactile imagination awakens our
consciousness of the importance of the tactile sense in our physical and
mental functioning, and thus, again, by making us feel better provided
for life than we were aware of being, gives us a heightened sense of
capacity. And this brings us back once more to the statement that the
chief business of the figure painter, as an artist, is to stimulate the
tactile imagination.