the potter. Such
"stylisation" is still described by art historians as a "degeneration"
due to unintelligent repetition; but it was on the contrary the
integrating process by which the representative element was
subjected to such aesthetic preferences as had been established in
the manufacture of objects whose usefulness or whose production
involved accurate measurement and equilibrium as in the case of
pottery or weapons, or rythmical reduplication as in that of textiles.

Be this question as it may (and the increasing study of the origin and
evolution of human faculties will some day settle it!) we already
know enough to affirm that while in the very earliest art the
shape-element and the element of representation are usually separate, the
two get gradually combined as civilisation advances, and the shapes
originally interesting only inasmuch as suggestions (hence as
magical equivalents) or things, and employed for religious,
recording, or self-expressive purposes, become subjected to
selection and rearrangement by the habit of avoiding disagreeable
perceptive and empathic activities and the desire of giving scope to
agreeable ones. Nay the whole subsequent history of painting and
sculpture could be formulated as the perpetual starting up of new
representative interests, new interests in _things,_ their spatial
existence, locomotion, anatomy, their reaction to light, and also their
psychological and dramatic possibilities; and the subordination of
these ever-changing interests in things to the unchanging habit of
arranging visible shapes so as to diminish opportunities for the
contemplative dissatisfaction and increase opportunities for the
contemplative satisfaction to which we attach the respective names
of "ugly" and "beautiful."

CHAPTER XIV

THE AIMS OF ART

WE have thus at last got to Art, which the Reader may have
expected to be dealt with at the outset of a primer on the Beautiful.

Why this could not be the case, will be more and more apparent in
my remaining chapters. And, in order to make those coming
chapters easier to grasp, I may as well forestall and tabulate the
views they embody upon the relation between the Beautiful and Art.
These generalisations are as follows:

Although it is historically probable that the habit of avoiding
ugliness and seeking beauty of shape may have been originally
established by utilitarian attention to the non-imitative
("geometrical") shapes of weaving, pottery