the beauty of a strain of music. The basis, in short, of any
aesthetic experience--poetry, music, painting, and the rest--
is beautiful through its harmony with the conditions offered
by our senses, primarily of sight and hearing, and through
the harmony of the suggestions and impulses it arouses with
the whole organism.

But the sensuous beauty of art does not exhaust the aesthetic
experience. What of the special emotions--the gayety or
triumph, the sadness or peace or agitation--that hang about
the work of art, and make, for many, the greater part of their
delight in it? Those among these special emotions which belong
to the subject-matter of a work--like our horror at the picture
of an execution--need not here be discussed. To understand the
rest we may venture for a moment into the realm of pure
psychology. We are told by psychology that emotion is dependent
on the organic excitations of any given idea. Thus fear at the
sight of a bear is only the reverberation in consciousness of
all nervous and vascular changes set up instinctively as a
preparation for flight. Think away our bodily feelings, and
we think away fear, too. And set up the bodily changes and the
feeling of them, and we have the emotion that belongs to them
even without the idea, as we may see in the unmotived panics
that sometimes accompany certain heart disturbances. The same
thing, on another level, is a familiar experience. A glass of
wine makes merriment, simply by bringing about those organic
states which are felt emotionally as cheerfulness. Now the
application of all this to aesthetics is clear. All these
tensions, relaxations,--bodily "imitations" of the form,--have
each the emotional tone which belongs to it. And so if the