Knowledge may therefore enter into beauty when, keeping
its liberality, it participates in an emotional experience; and every
other type of expression may become aesthetic if, retaining its native
spontaneity, it can acquire anew its old power to move the heart. To
be an artist means to be, like the child, free and sensitive in
envisaging the world.
Under these conditions, nature as well as art may be beautiful. In
themselves, things are never beautiful. This is not apparent to common
sense because it fails to think and analyze. But beauty may belong to
our _perceptions_ of things. For perception is itself a kind of
expression, a process of mind through which meanings are embodied in
sensations. Given are only sensations, but out of the mind come ideas
through which they are interpreted as objects. When, for example, I
perceive my friend, it may seem as if the man himself were a given
object which I passively receive; but, as a matter of fact, all that
is given are certain visual sensations; that these are my friend, is
pure interpretation--I construct the object in embodying this thought
in the color and shape I see. The elaboration of sensation in perception
is usually so rapid that, apart from reflection, I do not realize the
mental activity involved. But if it turns out that it was some other
man that I saw, then I realize at once that my perception was a work
of mind, an expression of my own thought. Of course, not all perceptions
are beautiful.
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