and tastes, is a
question of bodily and mental reflexes in which our conscious
activity, our voluntary attention, play no part: we are not _doing,_
but _done to_ by those stimulations from without; and the pleasure
or displeasure which they set up in us is therefore one which we
_receive,_ as distinguished from one which _we take._

Before passing on to the pleasure which the Man on the Hill _did
take,_ as distinguished from thus passively _receiving,_ from the
aspect before him, before investigating into the activities to which
this other kind of pleasure, _pleasure taken, not received,_ is due,
we must dwell a little longer on the colours which delighted him,
and upon the importance or unimportance of those colours with
regard to that _Aspect_ he was contemplating.

These colours--particularly a certain rain-washed blue, a pale lilac
and a faded russet--gave him, as I said, immediate and massive
pleasure like that of certain delicious tastes and smells, indeed
anyone who had watched him attentively might have noticed that he
was making rather the same face as a person rolling, as Meredith
says, a fine vintage against his palate, or drawing in deeper draughts
of exquisitely scented air; he himself, if not too engaged in looking,
might have noticed the accompanying sensations in his mouth,
throat and nostrils; all of which, his only active response to the
colour, was merely the attempt to _receive more_ of the already
received sensation. But this pleasure which he received from the
mere colours of the landscape was the same pleasure which they
would have given him if he had met them in so many skeins of silk;
the more complex pleasure due to their juxtaposition, was the
pleasure he might have had if those skeins, instead of being on
separate leaves of a pattern-book, had been lying tangled together in
an untidy work-basket. He might then probably have said, "Those
are exactly the colours, and in much the same combination, as in
that landscape we saw such and such a day, at such and such a
season and hour, from the top of that hill." But he would never have
said (or been crazy if he had) "Those skeins of silk are the landscape
we saw in that particular place and oh that particular occasion." Now
the odd thing is that he would have used that precise form of words,
"that is the landscape," etc. etc., if you had shown him a pencil
drawing or a photograph taken from that particular place and point
of view. And similarly