sculpture._

Sec. 37. The form of the material world is in one sense always
perfectly definite, since the particles that compose it are at each
moment in a given relative position; but a world that had no other
form than that of such a constellation of atoms would remain
chaotic to our perception, because we should not be able to survey
it as a whole, or to keep our attention suspended evenly over its
innumerable parts. According to evolutionary theory, mechanical
necessity has, however, brought about a distribution and
aggregation of elements such as, for our purposes, constitutes
individual things. Certain systems of atoms move together as units;
and these organisms reproduce themselves and recur so often in
our environment, that our senses become accustomed to view their
parts together. Their form becomes a natural and recognizable one.
An order and sequence is established in our imagination by virtue
of the order and sequence in which the corresponding impressions
have come to our senses. We can remember, reproduce, and in
reproducing vary, by kaleidoscopic tricks of the fancy, the forms in
which our perceptions have come.

The mechanical organization of external nature is thus the source
of apperceptive forms in the mind. Did not sensation, by a constant
repetition of certain sequences, and a recurring exactitude of
mathematical relations, keep our fancy clear and fresh, we should
fall into an imaginative lethargy. Idealization would degenerate
into indistinctness, and, by the dulling of our memory, we should
dream a world daily more poor and vague.

This process is periodically observable in the history of the arts.
The way in which the human figure, for instance, is depicted, is an
indication of the way in which it is apperceived. The arts give back
only so much of nature as the human eye has been able to master.
The most primitive stage of drawing and sculpture presents man
with his arms and legs, his ten fingers and ten toes, branching out
into mid-air; the apperception of the body has been evidently
practical and successive, and the artist sets down what he knows
rather than any of the particular perceptions that conveyed that
knowledge. Those perceptions are merged and lost in the haste to
reach the practically useful concept of the object. By a naive
expression of the same principle, we find in some Assyrian
drawings the eye seen from the front introduced into a face seen in
profile, each element being