essed
by beauty" which unscientific aestheticians imagined as analogous
to "being impressed by sensuous qualities," by hot or cold or sweet
or sour, is in reality a combination of higher activities, second in
complexity and intensity only to that of the artist himself.

We have seen in the immediately preceding chapter that the most
deliberate, though not the essential, part of the artist's business is to
provide against any possible disturbance of the beholder's
responsive activity, and of course also to increase by every means
that output of responsive activity. But the sources of it are in the
beholder, and beyond the control of the most ingenious artistic
devices and the most violent artistic appeals. There is indeed no
better proof of the active nature of aesthetic appreciation than the
fact that such appreciation is so often not forthcoming. Even mere
sensations, those impressions of single qualities to which we are
most unresistingly passive, are not pleasurable without a favourable
reaction of the body's chemistry: the same taste or smell will be
attractive or repulsive according as we have recently eaten. And
however indomitably colour- and sound-sensations force themselves
upon us, our submission to them will not be accompanied by even
the most "passive" pleasure if we are bodily or mentally out of sorts.
How much more frequent must be lack of receptiveness when,
instead of dealing with _sensations_ whose intensity depends after
all two thirds upon the strength of the outer stimulation, we deal
with _perceptions_ which include the bodily and mental activities of
exploring a shape and establishing among its constituent sensations
relationships both to each other and to ourselves; activities without
which there would be for the beholder no shape at all, but
mere ragbag chaos!--And in calculating the likelihood of a
perceptive empathic response we must remember that such active
shape-perception, however instantaneous as compared with the cumbrous
processes of locomotion, nevertheless requires a perfectly
measurable time, and requires therefore that its constituent processes
be held in memory for comparison and coordination, quite as much
as the similar processes by which we take stock of the relations of
sequence of sounds. All this mental activity, less explicit but not less
intense or complex than that of logically "following" an argument, is
therefore such that we are by no means always able or willing to
fu