if you had made him look through stained
glass which changed the pale blue, pale lilac and faded russet into
emerald green and blood red. He would have exclaimed at the loss
of those exquisite colours when you showed him the monochrome,
and perhaps have sworn that all his pleasure was spoilt when you
forced him to look through that atrocious glass. But he would have
identified the aspect as the one he had seen before; just as even the
least musical person would identify "God save the King" whether
played with three sharps on the flute or with four flats on the
trombone.

There is therefore in an _Aspect_ something over and above the
quality of the colours (or in a piece of music, of the sounds) in
which that aspect is, at any particular moment, embodied for your
senses; something which can be detached from the particular colours
or sounds and re-embodied in other colours or sounds, existing
meanwhile in a curious potential schematic condition in our memory.
That something is _Shape._

It is Shape which we contemplate; and it is only because they enter
into shapes that colours and sounds, as distinguished from
temperatures, textures, tastes and smells, can be said to be
contemplated at all. Indeed if we apply to single isolated colour or
sound-qualities (that blue or russet, or the mere timbre of a voice or
an orchestra) the adjective _beautiful_ while we express our liking
for smells, tastes, temperatures and textures merely by the adjectives
_agreeable, delicious_; this difference in our speech is doubtless due
to the fact that colours or sounds are more often than not connected
each with other colours or other sounds into a Shape and thereby
become subject to contemplation more frequently than temperatures,
textures, smells and tastes which cannot themselves be grouped into
shapes, and are therefore objects of contemplation only when
associated with colours and sounds, as for instance, the smell of
burning weeds in a description of autumnal sights, or the cool
wetness of a grotto in the perception of its darkness and its murmur
of waters.

On dismissing the practical and the scientific man because they were
_thinking away from aspects to things,_ I attempted to inventory the
_aspect_ in whose contemplation their aesthetic companion had
remained absorbed. There were the colours, that delicious
recently-washed blue, that lilac and russet, which gave the man his
immediate shock of passive and (as much as smell and t