details, until the acquisition of vivid mental images became
the chief item of the savage man's education, as it still is of the
self-education of the modern child. This evolution of interest in visible
aspects would of course increase tenfold as soon as mankind took to
making things whose usefulness (_i.e._ their still non-existent
qualities) might be jeopardised by a mistake concerning their shape.
For long after _over_ and _under, straight_ and _oblique, right_ and
_left,_ had become habitual perceptions in dealing with food and
fuel, the effective aim of a stone, the satisfactory flight of an arrow,
would be discovered to depend upon more or less of what we call
horizontals and perpendiculars, curves and angles; and the stability
of a fibrous tissue upon the intervals of crossing and recrossing, the
rythmical or symmetrical arrangements revealed by the hand or eye.
In short, _making,_ being inevitably _shaping,_ would have
developed a more and more accurate perception and recollection of
every detail of shape. And not only would there arise a comparison
between one shape and another shape, but between the shape
actually under one's eyes and the shape no longer present, between
the shape as it really was and the shape as it ought to be. Thus in the
very course of practical making of things there would come to be
little interludes, recognised as useful, first of more and more
careful looking and comparing, and then of real contemplation:
contemplation of the arrow-head you were chipping, of the mat
you were weaving, of the pot you were rubbing into shape;
contemplation also of the _other_ arrow-head or mat or pot existing
only in your wishes; of the shape you were trying to obtain with a
premonitory emotion of the effect which its peculiarities would
produce when once made visible to your eye! For the man cutting
the arrow-head, the woman plaiting the mat, becoming familiar with
the appropriate shapes of each and thinking of the various individual
arrow-heads or mats of the same type, _would become aware of the
different effect which such shapes had on the person who looked at
them._ Some of these shapes would be so dull, increasing the
tediousness of chipping and filing or of laying strand over strand;
others so alert, entertaining and likeable, as if they were helping in
the work; others, although equally compatible with utility, fussing or
distressing one, never doing what one expected their lines and
curves to do.