with the ideas of truth and of morality, or from the standpoint
of empirical science. For our present purpose, we may confine
ourselves to the empirical facts of psychology and physiology.

When I feel the rhythm of poetry, or of perfect prose, which
is, of course, in its own way, no less rhythmical, every
sensation of sound sends through me a diffusive wave of nervous
energy. I am the rhythm because I imitate it in myself. I
march to noble music in all my veins, even though I may be
sitting decorously by my own hearthstone; and when I sweep with
my eyes the outlines of a great picture, the curve of a Greek
vase, the arches of a cathedral, every line is lived over again
in my own frame. And when rhythm and melody and forms and
colors give me pleasure, it is because the imitating impulses
and movements that have arisen in me are such as suit, help,
heighten my physical organization in general and in particular.
It may seem somewhat trivial to say that a curved line is
pleasing because the eye is so hung as to move best in it;
but we may take it as one instance of the numberless conditions
for healthy action which a beautiful form fulfills. A well-
composed picture calls up in the spectator just such a balanced
relation of impulses of attention and incipient movements as
suits an organism which is also balanced--bilateral--in its
own impulses to movement, and at the same time stable; and it
is the correspondence of the suggested impulses with the
natural movement that makes the composition good. Besides the
pleasure from the tone relations,--which doubtless can be
eventually reduced to something of the same kind,--it is the
balance of nervous and muscular tensions and relaxations, of
yearnings and satisfactions, which are the subjective side of