aim, in connection with a picture, for instance, would be to
show how the sensations and associated ideas from color, line,
composition, and all the other elements of a picture may, on
general psychological principles, bring about this state of
happy absorption. Such elements as can be shown to have a
direct relation to the aesthetic experience are then counted
as elements of the beauty of the aesthetic object, and such
as are invariable in all art forms would belong to the general
formula or concept of Beauty.

<1> M.W. Calkins: An Introduction to Psychology, 1902, p. 278.

This, it seems to me, is as favorable a way as possible of
stating the possibilities of an independent aesthetic psychology.

Yet this method, as it works out, does not exhaust the problem
the solution of which was affirmed to be the aim of every
aesthetics. The aesthetic experience is very complex, and the
theoretical consequences of emphasizing this or that element
very great. Thus, if it were held that the characteristics of
the aesthetic experience could be given by the complete analysis
of a single well-marked case,--say, our impressions before a
Doric column, or the Cathedral of Chartres, or the Giorgione
Venus,--it could be objected that for such a psychological
experience the essential elements are hard to isolate. The
cathedral is stone rather than staff; it is three hundred
rather than fifty feet high. Our reaction upon these facts
may or may not be essentials to the aesthetic moment, and we
can know whether they are essentials only by comparison and
exclusion. It might be said, therefore, that the analysis of