part from any images they awaken, are often irresistibly
evocative of emotion. And among other emotions words can evoke
the one due to the easy perception and to the life-corroborating
empathic interpretation of shapes. The word _Beautiful,_ and its
various quasi synonyms, are among the most emotionally suggestive
in our vocabulary, carrying perhaps a vague but potent remembrance
of our own bodily reaction to the emotion of admiration; nay even
eliciting an incipient rehearsal of the half-parted lips and slightly
thrown-back head, the drawn-in breath and wide-opened eyes, with
which we are wont to meet opportunities of aesthetic satisfaction. Be
this last as it may, it is certain that the emotion connected with the
word _Beautiful_ can be evoked by that word alone, and without an
accompanying act of visual or auditive perception. Indeed beautiful
shapes would lose much of their importance in our life, if they did
not leave behind them such emotional traces, capable of revival
under emotionally appropriate, though outwardly very dissimilar,
circumstances; and thereby enormously increasing some of our
safest, perhaps because our most purely subjective, happiness.
Instead therefore of despising the raptures which the presence of a
Venus of Milo or a Sixtine Madonna can inspire in people
manifestly incapable of appreciating a masterpiece, and sometimes
barely glancing at it, we critical persons ought to recognise in this
funny, but consoling, phenomenon an additional proof of the power
of Beauty, whose specific emotion can thus be evoked by a mere
name and so transferred from some past experience of aesthetic
admiration to a. present occasion which would otherwise be mere
void and disappointment.

Putting aside these kind of cases, the transfer (usually accomplished
by a word) of the aesthetic emotion, or at least of a willingness for
aesthetic emotion, is probably one of the explanations of the spread
of aesthetic interest from one art to another, as it is the explanation
of some phases of aesthetic development in the individual. The
present writer can vouch for the case of at least one real child in
whom the possibility of aesthetic emotion, and subsequently of
aesthetic appreciation, was extended from music and natural scenery
to pictures and statues, by the application of the word _Beautiful_ to
each of these different categories. And something analogous
probably helped on the primaeval recognition that the empathic
p