o the rythm of our mental life, and therefore a chief factor
in all artistic production and appreciation.

CHAPTER XV

ATTENTION TO SHAPES

TO explain how art in general, and any art in particular, succeeds in
reconciling these contradictory demands, I must remind the Reader
of what I said (p. 93) about the satisfactory or unsatisfactory
possibilities of shapes having begun to be noticed in the moments of
slackened attention to the processes of manufacturing the objects
embodying those shapes, and in the intervals between practical
employment of these more or less _shapely_ objects. And I must ask
him to connect with these remarks a previous passage (p. 44)
concerning the intermittent nature of normal acts of attention, and
their alternation as constituting _on-and-off beats._ The deduction
from these two converging statements is that, contrary to the a-priori
theories making aesthetic contemplation an exception, a kind of
bank holiday, to daily life, it is in reality one-half of daily life's
natural and healthy rythm. That the real state of affairs, as revealed
by psychological experiment and observation, should have escaped
the notice of so many aestheticians, is probably due to their theories
starting from artistic production rather than from aesthetic
appreciation, without which art would after all probably never have
come into existence.

The production of the simplest work of art cannot indeed be thought
of as one of the alternations of everyday attention, because it is a
long, complex and repeatedly resumed process, a whole piece of life,
including in itself hundreds and thousands of alternations of _doing_
and _looking,_ of discursive thinking of aims and ways and means
and of contemplation of aesthetic results. For even the humblest
artist has to think of whatever objects or processes his work aims at
representing, conveying or facilitating; and to think also of the
objects, marble, wood, paints, voices, and of the processes, drawing,
cutting, harmonic combining, by which he attempts to compass one
of the above-mentioned results. The artist is not only an aesthetically
appreciative person; he is, in his own way, a man of science and a
man of practical devices, an expert, a craftsman and an engineer. To
produce a work of art is not an interlude in his life, but his life's
main business; and he therefore stands apart, as every busy specialist
must, from the business of other specialists, of those ministe